


A Salted Field

by octobertown



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Animal Death, Blood, Blood and Gore, Character Death, Dark Reylo, Don’t answer when they whisper your name, Don’t drive home alone at night, Don’t go into the field, Don’t look too closely into the corn, Don’t walk the furrows, F/M, Feldgeister, Folklore, Haunted Houses, Isolation, It’s just the grain. It’s just the grain. It’s just the grain., Kylo Ren Has Issues, Madness, Oppressive Landscape, POV Rey, POV Rey (Star Wars), Past Character Death, Rey Kenobi, Reylo - Freeform, Rural Horror, Slavic Folklore, Small Towns, Star Wars - AU - Freeform, Violence, folk horror, midwest gothic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2020-07-28 20:35:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 23
Words: 112,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20070187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/octobertown/pseuds/octobertown
Summary: Long-estranged orphan, Rey, returns home to small midwest town to reclaim her grandfather’s estate. The house is a ruin, but there’s a fortune in farming opportunities in the field. Wanting nothing more than to be rid of the property and return to Nevada, a photo of her infant self prompts her to stay as the circumstances of Obi-Wan’s death entangle her with the town’s locals and their strange customs. Only Ben Solo, a son of Junari Point whose blood is as black as the soil, can reveal a world unseen to Rey -- prompting her to try and save him from the life he’s chosen.A Star Wars AU where midwest gothic and folk horror intersect to explore themes of isolation, madness, lost legacies, haunted houses, and the furrow creatures that stalk the fields during the harvest: Forever hungry. Always watchful.





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing ever happens in small towns, right?

[ ](https://ibb.co/bP15Fd6)

  
**A Salted Field**  
  
Prelude

**-**

_Don’t drive home alone at night._  
_Don’t look too closely into the corn._  
_Don’t go into the field._  
_Don’t walk the furrows._  
_Don’t answer when they whisper your name._  
_It’s just the grain._  
_It’s just the grain._  
_It’s just the grain._

_ _

Endless acres of gold parched to paper, the color of old photographs, whispered to him across the field under a sky the color of sleet. Thunderheads in the distance and the promise of a rain sat heavy on his skin, already sticky with blood and sweat. More, he could feel it approaching as surely as that shadow resolving itself in the west field: sunsetted against the corn, struggling to become something recognizable. 

The ground was thirsty.

The wind was dead.

Sweat-caked and streaked with dried gore, he rolled his head to the side, struggling to keep the sabre gripped in fingers whose strength gradually faded the darker the sky grew, and the closer that thing in the west field got. He could have used the shotgun, but the blade — that old thing — was a weapon from a more civilized time. Not that he could hold it anymore. You needed at least all five fingers for that sort of thing, and his pinkie and ring finger had been better offerings than helpful tools intended to help defend himself. The electric chill of air grazing his open wounds felt like winter, though the harvest had barely started.

The sky darkened overhead, clouds churning, making the crop seem as if it was worth the rain. There hadn’t been a yield in years that was worth the sweat, nor the blood. Some things were too dear.

Breath wheezed into his remaining lung, the other useless — punctured, most likely, by one of his ribs.

His body bore its punishments like the crop: drought, overwork, harsh winters, short summers, the demands of the people that depended on it.

He coughed, and the sound was wet.

Rolling his eyes to the left, he thought he felt their attention shift from his body to the field beyond him — all of them waiting with such patient certainty that it would soon be over, and there would be someone to witness the justice for his transgressions, as it was served.

They hadn’t even bothered with the rope, though the chair they’d sat him in they’d dragged from the kitchen as if it were electrified and heavier than it was. One of the legs was busted, or perhaps that was because his body still saw fit to sag to the left as he waited.

The footsteps on the porch behind him slowed, the occasional creak and clatter of their weapons less a portent now that they’d set him out here on the lawn.

Only the crunch of dry grass, flattened from waist-high along the borders of his property, announced their approach. Even so, he could hear the hesitation in their steps as they neared the boundary of the field. The corn dwarfed him already — not even the end of September, yet, and it cast long shadows onto the lawn, encroaching on the house that overlooked it.

The oil of their guns and the copper-tang of their fear was lost under so much sweetness when he inhaled, tasting sweet grass on his tongue despite the blood. They brought with them chewing tobacco and rot and sweat, and all the things that made men fallible.

“Not much longer,” was the only assurance he received that all this waiting was just about done. And good.

He tried to crane around to see their faces, to look at them square, but with the snapped collarbone and what felt like a bruised bone or two, he only listed, sagging where he body no longer wanted to hold him.

Phantom hands jerked upright roughly, the buttons from his shirt popping from the cloth like dandelion heads from their stems, only to be sent flying into the field like small, opalescent seeds: reminders that he’d rise again from this ordeal, someday. Perhaps. The fabric draping his shoulders was simple and softened with wear, and pulled from limbs that remained strong well into his years when other things began to fail: his heart, his hips, but never his mind. Never memory…

Never the knowledge that there was no death; only the Force.

“Gentle, now,” the voice cautioned his compatriots. “They get fragile when they get to that age.”

He tried to smile around his split lip, warmth dripping over his chin and into his beard for the trouble. The sting of the wound was a distant reminder that his heart still beat, and that his soul lingered too close to the soil to be scared off by shadows and the threat of darkness.

“You gonna run?” The question was accompanied by the squelching too-full sounds of a cheek crammed with chewing tobacco. “Reminds folk of how things used to be, when the balance was kept on both sides: light and dark. Like the old days. Sun chases the moon chases the sun in a never-ending circle. It’s the Way.”

It was a moment before he found his voice, the effort of speaking a struggle. Bones and salt and tears — a collection of trappings that could be bruised and hurt, but shook off if the heart was light. It amused him, still, in spite of the pain, and even when they hoisted him by the arms and hauled him, tilling the rows with his dragging feet as they walked him out into the field, the saber forgotten on the bleached grass of his farmstead behind.

They’d left his house in disarray, but that wasn’t the important thing:

The girl was safe, someplace far from here where the skies never greyed. He’d made certain of it, and for that, he thanked any and all of the gods he knew by name.

The corn lashed him as they hastened to bring him to the appropriate place in the field.

One of his assailants muttered an oath, sagging limbs leaving stains that wouldn’t so easily wash away. The symbols on his skin wept, even as they carved new ones into his back, reopening old wounds as if to mark him more thoroughly so there was no mistake as to why an old man would be left naked and bleeding in his own crop of corn.

“Why is he smiling?” one of them asked.

There was a certain peace to the farm: his land was an endless, rolling defense against the world that whispered secrets in his ears. It buoyed his spirit, knowing that the soil would take his body, but his spirit didn’t take such pains to be shackled. It grew like grain.

“We gotta go. Now.” A warning choked the sound, and they left him there — just barely — staring at all that red as it slicked the stalks where he caught himself against his crop. Without the support of their hands to hold him up, he sank to his knees, first — the pain of being stiff and broken a distant consideration as his hands found the earth.

Their steps were quick, fading under the low rumble of breaking stalks.

His fists found purchase in the very soil he’d tilled and sowed and nurtured, giving his long years and his love and his lonely penitence to turn it black and rich.

The shadow loomed, throwing his body beneath that ever-hungry shroud of darkness. It fell upon him, devouring the lingering light of a weak sun as he turned his face up to peer into its death mask with bloodshot eyes.

The world grew cold, and Obi-Wan felt the pull of the Force in its endless ebb and flow around him as he gave his body over to it, unafraid though he could not raise his saber to meet his adversary, now, as it loomed over him. He smiled to meet his fate at last.

Breath wheezed into his lungs, one which had surely collapsed for their trouble. Head lolling, close to those currents that stirred amongst the stalks, he managed, “Strike me down now, and I will rise more powerful than you could ever imagine.”

The shadow moved at last.

And then, there was only darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to say the worst of it's over: I'm opening this story with warnings of blood and gore, animal sacrifice, rusted farming machinery, teasing major character death(s), superstition of Slavic and Germanic origin, and ill-timed meetings beneath stars unseen. This is a love letter to the unholy trinity of folk horror: if you were looking for smut, we'll get there, but it's going to take some time to wade through the plot.
> 
> Happy harvest. I'm [octobertown](http://octobertown.tumblr.com).


	2. A Symphony of Insects

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I find prologue's particularly unfair, especially under circumstances where you meet a character only to watch them die. This is particularly problematic inasmuch as in (most) of the texts on writing (better) that I've read, prologues are shunned by editors because they often don't introduce you to the protagonist -- the character we're meant to give a shit about -- and they don't deliver you to the story _in media res_. That's the nice thing about fanfiction -- we can take those alleged "rules" and flout them if it pleases us. 
> 
> I aim to post a chapter once a week, providing that the chapter's word count is appropriate. I wouldn't want anyone wasting a click-through on five hundred words, so I'm blocking my scenes into neat little packages. There is one exception, of course, and you're about to read it a day after the prologue went live. Under ideal circumstances, I'll be releasing chapters with a little more regularity. 
> 
> Welcome to Junari Point.

That the Chevy made it past state lines without dropping its bumper back in Takodana, she supposed, was a testament to the pickup’s enduring stubbornness to not give up the ghost. Enough patch jobs, modifications, and spare parts made it more of a Frankenstein’s monster than a truck, but it ran, still — bearing her North-East until the Nevada desert became green peaks, and then faded again to sun-charred gold fields, corn stalks breaking their spines backward with the weight of their fruit.

Giving the wheel a squeeze as a billboard rose into view over the sparse tree-line, Rey gave silent thanks to the ’86 Silverado whose keys she’d snuck from Unkar Plutt’s collection of disused, “re-appropriated” vehicles. Someone — a previous owner — had christened the heap, but Rey thought the name emblazoned over the bumper was more ruse than anything. Once gleaming, The Falcon had long lost its sheen and gained a patina of rust that spattered its sides as if it had taken one too many dips into the creek, but it managed two thousand miles from the coast and would carry her back just as soon as this business was packed away into a box big enough that she could bury it.

The engine stammered in protest at the first Illinois billboard along I-85 that bore four stark characters against all that grimy white, and truth be told, Rey’s foot weighed a little more heavily on the gas as the letters resolved into a word that felt more like a warning than a command:

**PRAY**

Rey did whisper something below her breath, but it didn’t end with an, “Amen.”

Her furry sidekick lifted his head in the rearview at the interruption to his nap — his shaggy bulk occupying most of the backseat.

“It’s okay, Chewie,” she said to the large dog. Not unlike an oversized teddy bear, the Mastiff-Malamute mix boffed his head against the tuck’s ceiling and made a noise of complaint that they were somehow still driving after six hours.

“We’ll be in and out of there so fast you’ll barely have time to find a fire hydrant,” she promised.

Granted, she wasn’t entirely certain that a place like Junari Point, Illinois, even had fire hydrants. As far as she could tell with a bit of pre-emptive googling, it was some rural backwater in the middle of the country buffered by corn, soy, and wheat fields; just a desolate swath of land outside of Hanna City where a few hundred souls endured another summer’s drought by refusing to leave.

As she understood it — and she was no expert, growing up in the Jakku desert where it was hard to grow a potted cactus — there had been several years’ worth of dry spell plaguing the area, but that wasn’t deterring the locals.

The water tower rose above the tree-line like a steeple, bearing marks left by only the most daring teenagers who saw fit to climb it. The name of the town on its side was faded, but the words, “Hell is empty,” remained stark and running red in wet streaks down the barrel. The vandal who spray-painted the words hadn’t the real estate to finish it, it seemed.

“‘The devils are here,’” she told Chewie, who snuffled in his sleep but made no further comment about the attempted Shakespeare.

If it felt like a portent, she ignored the feeling for the grody tiredness of two days’ dust from the interstate, and the grim understanding that very few things would have pulled her from her vigil save for a hesitant phone call received while washing the dishes in her modest basement apartment.

The voice on the other end of the line had carried a weighted firmness, introducing herself as “Mrs. Organa, Mayor of Hanna City, Chandrila County.” Rey had dried her hands on the rag she’d forgotten from her stint in the garage, working on The Falcon on her one afternoon off, and left grease smears on the counter for the trouble.

The line crackled and spat, and it was a moment before Rey decided that Ms. Organa’s hesitation was born from honest trepidation when she said, “I regret to inform you of your grandfather’s passing. I’m sorry for your loss,” with all the diplomacy of a seasoned politician, and the practiced sympathy to match.

If the line had gone dead, Rey wouldn’t have minded, because the next matter in the case of the departure of one Mr. Obi-Wan Kenobi was not his estate and holdings, but who the hell the guy was — because, as Rey had put it, she was keenly unaware of, any “Grandfather?” and it had taken a moment to register that there was no mistake.

The email had arrived shortly thereafter with a scan of Rey’s birth certificate: some proof that she’d once belonged to someone; that she’d come from someplace.

It struck hollow and low, leaving her knees shaking and palms trailing smears of sweat down the wall as she sank into a crouch, keeping near the floor in case she blacked out from the shock of it.

The decision to leave Nevada, even for a few short days, took a Xanax and an hours’ worth of begging for an advance on her pay-check to pay for the gas to get her halfway across the country, “just for a few days,” as she’d told Plutt. It wasn’t necessarily what it might mean for her pay-check, nor her standing at the garage (which, judging by her wages, was hardly better than slavery), but the tally of marks on the living room wall that made up five thousand one hundred and fourteen days’ worth of waiting for some sign that she wasn’t quite so alone in the galaxy offered reason enough to go.

When Mrs. Organa asked in that delicate and only slightly fractured tone, if Rey would come to the Illinois farm because this man had no one else in the world at all, Rey felt a stirring of sympathy for the stranger who might’ve been hers, once. It was followed with the sharp sting of understanding that if she was his only next of kin, then truly, there was nothing else to wait on in Jakku, save her flagging hope that someone might be coming back for her child-self and all its hopeful dreams of a mother and father.

In a rare moment of vulnerability, she’d confessed to this woman, “But I don’t have any family,” to which Mrs. Organa replied with only a modest hitch in her voice, “But you do have people.”

Anyone else that the Mayor might’ve traced down remained just out of reach to the politician, too, it seemed, and if that alone didn’t allow for some small hope to unfurl in Rey’s chest, Rey could have drawn a small, red X on the heartland, knowing by some freak coincidence that it was her point of origin. What secrets lay there, buried in all that soil, was left to be unearthed because she’d packed a bag that very evening to ensure a quick recovery of any valuable clues pertaining to “those people,” and an even speedier liquidation of the farm and lands so she could get back home to resume her watch. It felt like a revival — a rebirth of her earliest efforts searching the library’s microfiche and old orphanage records, but now, something of substance waited for her: an entire house-worth of clues lending to her life before foster care.

There was the farm too, of course: a whole bucketload of inheritance in land. Corn, soy, and wheat awaited her — though that field had laid fallow for some years. An old farm house and its treasures sitting on sixty acres. That’s what made Rey’s heart stutter — not the land, though Rey expected that it was a lot to negotiate, growing up on back lots and street corners — but the house and its contents might offer up something golden. More valuable than any price the property might fetch, her history was buried out there, and with a little digging, she thought she might unearth some clues about her future.

Rey could think of nothing she wanted more: being found by the family she’d waited for to come home to her; to belong at last.

A rock pinged the windshield of the Falcon, and Chewie’s growl of complaint had her reaching into the back seat, threading her hands into the thick scruff of his neck and giving him a scrub.

“Yes, I know,” she managed, squinting at a dusted-over sign that indicated the town’s boundary and its population: a stark 642 souls belonged to Junari Point.

641 as of late.

She pursed her lips into a thin line, noting that the turn off the interstate was quick to bleed from concrete into gravel, and then dirt.

Her phone bounced on banquette seat beside her, and snatching at it, she swiped the screen against her thigh to smear through any fingerprints. Tacking it against the wheel where she could keep an eye on the road, a glance revealed that they had made good time, having left before dawn, but cellular reception waned to a single bar. Google Maps was offline entirely, and she hadn’t thought to download the offline directions: not that she had many options — it looked like it was a straight shot to nowhere, out here.

Sparse trees dotted a long aisle of dirt road flanked on either side by corn fields. In the distance, the stunted, squat buildings of the central town gaped at her like a jaw with missing teeth; grimy against a sky stained orange.

Chewie huffed a breath, planting his head squarely in her rearview. No matter. There wasn’t a soul for miles on any side of them, and Rey doubted that anyone up at this hour would be tailgating.

“It’s a straight shot through to Hanna City,” she told her co-pilot.

His mouth dropped open, his tongue lolling and pink, leaving strands of slobber down his bib.

“What do you think?” she asked him, not expecting a response.

The dog huffed, warbling a question that Rey took to be an invitation for that long stretch of open road, her toes itching in her chucks to give the Falcon its berth.

Chewie yawled, upright and awake, and far more interested in the open window as he repositioned himself to sniff at all the possibilities that tumbled into the car from the outside world.

“Right,” said Rey. “Punch it.” She hit the gas, the Falcon fishtailing a few feet before kicking up a cloud of dust, the engine’s purr turning as guttural as if at Chewbacca’s yowl of approval.

Grinning, Rey laughed as the car leapt forward, gunning down that long stretch of road as if ready to take flight — faster and freer, and filled with the burgeoning possibility of the day where the horizon dipped into that sea of gold that stretched around them for miles.

The country was sweet and raw, and Rey breathed it in:

It smelled like destiny.

\--

The Falcon slowed, bumping over blacktop as the town loomed. The water tower should have been a portent, she thought, the car jostling as dirt road became street. Chewie’s huff of protest was followed by a whine as he flattened himself to the seat in the back, not liking the look of the place:

What might’ve once been pastels and creams on the spartan storefronts had bleached to bone — the raw wood and flecked char of the sun whittling away both the pristine and the patina so that what remained were ghosts of the former buildings:

Hardware. Liquor store. The gas station, with pumps that were more rusted relics from a bygone age, but somehow still suggested serviceability. She slowed further, dropping below the posted speed limit to survey everything Junari Point had to offer, and found it wanting.

A few wilted begonias sat in crates that served as flowerbeds outside the Post Office, but the place looked like it had been abandoned in the fifties.

Frowning, she murmured to her companion, “It’s a good thing we won’t be staying long.”

The totality of Junari Point’s downtown crested five city blocks, each stretching farther apart as empty buildings took up occupancy between those that remained in use. Not much to look at, but Rey reminded herself that people lived off of the land — like at Niima, for example, which had grown out of the desert sands to flourish into a buzzing centre for despots and scoundrels alike, though its humble origins had once only been an outpost for traders. It hadn’t taken much, only time and a handful of years where necessity forced an isolated community into something that thrived.

Junari Point was probably past its prime, and that was putting it politely.

She pursed her lips, trying to curb the thought before it could blossom into something cruel. Somehow, she’d expected… more, perhaps: more than an isolated backwater that had gone to seed by neglect or some other run of bad luck — a poor crop, perhaps.

The door of the bar off Main Street clanged against the tin siding of the building, pouring a few locals into the street like cheap beer. They turned and stared as she drove past, shrinking into the Falcon’s vinyl as if she would escape their notice.

Someone whistled. Chewie barked back, hanging out the window.

Rey hit the gas, not caring for the long, searching consideration behind squinted eyes; skin weathered by the sun and harsh conditions of field work. A third figure followed the first two who spilled into onto the sidewalk — a lean, dark swath of a man in greyed denim, the brim of his hat pulled low over eyes she couldn’t see, though something about him held her attention.

She lost him as the Falcon clipped a pothole, and beyond Chewie, it took a moment for him to reappear in the rearview like some sort of shadow sliced away from where it belonged: the darkness under the staircase, a sliver of shadow beneath the bed. He looked up as if catching her staring, his gaze veiled but seemingly penetrating as if hearing his name from her lips.

Rey wrenched the wheel left before she could hit a mailbox. With the car righted, she shook herself, her hands slicking over the wheel as she drove into the curve of the road and the trio vanished beyond the bend.

Her pulse beat in her throat, and swallowing it down, she huffed a steadying exhale.

The weight of the man’s heavy regard was as sharp as if he’d grazed her skin with a razor.

It lingered. Electric like air over a wound.

She didn’t know him, but she felt as if she should.

It made her feel strangely isolated — called out for being the clear other in a situation where she’d strayed too far from the comforts of waiting for something to happen back home.

The goosebumps risen on her arms took a moment further to sink back into her skin.

She reddened. No stranger to hardship, Rey understood the locals’ roving curiosity as surely as they might’ve peeled the paint from the Falcon’s exterior. Small town like this — everyone must know everyone, and everyone’s business. It seemed unlikely that Junari Point had many strangers wandering through, and if it did, it didn’t seem that the locals were putting in much effort.

It was stupid. She was being stupid.

Chewie ruffed his agreement.

“Don’t start,” she told him.

Out past the centre of town, a faded banner hung over Main Street, announcing the beginning of some harvest festival whose dates recalled a week that happened two decades prior. It seemed that the townsfolk had repurposed the original decoration for a few years, as hay bales were arranged on the median in stacks beneath a flag pole that bore no signs of lingering patriotism: there were no stars and stripes, but long ribbons remained in tattered tangles. A few dusty pumpkins flanked the arrangement, corn stalks bound together in a fan behind the pile that made the hay seem like a throne.

A few children in patched clothing occupying a bench beneath the shade of an old elm paused to look at her, the youngest of them clutching a doll to her chest that was singular in color — as gold as the fields that suffocated this tiny sliver of civilization out here in the middle of so much nothing.

Rey blinked at it, her car slowing, turning back only to recognize why the toy seemed familiar and foreign at once: the doll had been crafted from an ear of corn and its husk. Something clenched in her chest at that, squeezing a little as if to remind her that she might’ve come from a life like this, had the stars aligned differently.

Their attention was less thorough than the adults, though the girl with the doll ran into the street after the Falcon, waving the toy like an offering for her to come back.

Rey only slowed before the General Store. The sign hanging in the window still facing the street read “closed,” to her dismay, though she swore she saw a face peering at her from behind dirty glass.

“Sorry, Chewie,” she said. “No snacks here.”

About to pull away, Rey took note of something curious: an outline blacked by dirt in the old wood lintel over the front door. She stared at it a moment, thinking it seemed too primitive to be graffiti. Why she lingered, contemplating an old scratch, she couldn’t rightly answer for herself, but something about it remained markedly odd enough to leave her feeling a little… off.

Like the child’s corn doll, there were just some customs that didn’t make it past country porches. She supposed Junari was no different.

Rey’s attention moved on as the remaining buildings diminished into razed parking lots and stunted grass, yellowed and parched. Main Street became highway again — or what passed for it — and Rey stayed the course. Country roads forked left and right, leading off into various homesteads that she had no business being curious about. A stunted thatch of forest revealed itself to the South, cutting a long, dark swath against the horizon.

She exhaled, not realizing she’d drawn her shoulders to her ears, knotting all the tension in her neck as she passed the town limits. Hanna City was a few miles south, but as Mayor Organa had put it, the only way out of Junari Point was through.

She’d bear it, she decided, as if those words of caution were more a portent than the Mayor realized:

Rey drove from the town undiminished though the prospect of having to return left a grit in the corners of her being like sand working its way into the eyes: a little uncomfortable, with a little less shine for the place that her grandfather had once called home.

Some determination kept her from sagging at the Falcon’s wheel, inching forward as she barrelled down that long stretch of road to the appointed place where Mayor Organa meant to get her oriented. Settled. Prepared for the hours to come.

She licked her lips, finding that unsticking her tongue from the roof of her mouth was just another distraction she needed to shake off, rather than dwelling on the reason her nerves began plucking at her resolve like she was a fiddle meant to be played off-key. Rey cleared her throat, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and tossed another cursory glance at the rearview.

The trio had vanished from the street, but the sensation of being watched lingered, still. 

There was no one behind her, of course, though a lingering shadow in the periphery of her vision made her turn her head as if what she might find there was another lean cut of darkness, built like a man with a musculature hewn from hard work. Broad shoulders under threadbare flannel. Jeans softened from overuse and clinging to muscle.

Not frowning, but not smiling either. A full mouth obscured by facial hair.

Something settled low and heavy in her belly, and Rey pulled herself straighter, telling herself it was just her mind playing tricks:

She thought his eyes might be brown.

She thought he looked as if he’d seen some things most people wanted to forget.

Chewie “ruffed” at nothing on the side of the road, and Rey jerked at the sound on reflex.

Walls of corn shrank, the crop hewn to half size as soy fields overtook the next stretch of road: withered and burnt, they looked as if the harvest had only just begun, and someone unseen was working in earnest to get the job done. She could hear crickets in the field — or maybe cicadas? She wasn’t certain. A symphony of insects greeted her, their songs hummed like bowstrings through all that gold.

That saddened her for reasons she couldn’t quite pinpoint; how lonely it seemed, to be surrounded all of this land for miles without another soul for company, day after day beneath long skies and thin clouds.

She drove on as though the feeling that she was more alone than ever needed to be braced against, as if it might become oppressive if she lingered on it too long. The sun peeked out for a moment, alighting on the Falcon and catching her freckle-daubed skin as she lifted her arm out the window — as if it reminded her that there was something to return to when she was done out here: her return to the searing heat of Jakku, hopefully with answers to the one question that continued to burn inside her:

“Who am I?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're a guest to this fic, and you'd like to be updated at the next chapter release, feel free to punch my [Ask on Tumblr](https://octobertown.tumblr.com/ask) with your username, and I'll add you to the updates list.


	3. The Good Guys

Hanna City’s Old Gather house had all the imposing pomp and stature of something that she might’ve imagined out in the capital: its columns were bannered with the proclamation that whatever harvest festival was happening in its smaller annex was forgotten in the “big” city — a sign that they weren’t trifling with lesser rituals, preferring instead to declare their proud hundred years of age since their founding, but not much else.

Chewie draped his large head out the window, his bulk preventing him from squeezing out and following as Rey climbed the few steps to the building that served as courthouse, jail, library, and state building. She hushed him back, knowing that if she let him out to stretch his legs now, she’d never get him back into the car. 

She needn’t have bothered, however, because the man that met her at the door raised both eyebrows when he spied the truck — and the monster in it.

“Poe,” he said, extending a hand. “Poe Dameron. Chief of Police.”

“I’m Rey,” she said by way of introduction, offering Chewie a self-conscious glance as he warbled a protest that she was leaving him behind.

Poe flashed teeth, and said, “I know.”

There was a warm intensity about him that made her shoulders relax, dropping an inch as he craned around her, his eyes crinkling at the corners at the sight of her mutt.

“And who’s this?”

He was halfway down the steps before she could stop him.

The thwap of Chewie’s tail against the vinyl was answer enough, but it was a deceptive sound: one that might end with an arm ripped off if the dog found him wanting.

“Who’s a big boy?” Poe crooned.

“Careful,” Rey warned. “He’s deceptively earnest — it’s a lure, I promise. Expects biscuits.”

“Judging by the size of him, I’d say he’s earning them.”

Slobber trailed from dog to man as Poe found his collar, flipping it over and reading the name carved into the metal tag as his hands found Chewie’s sweet spot — the notch behind his ears and proceeded to scratch with vigour.

“Chewbacca? That’s an unusual name.”

Rey lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “His previous owner was more inventive than I am, I expect.”

The tide turned, something glinting in Chewie’s gaze as if he’d scented something wrong with the Chief of Police — too many large white teeth cramming his mouth, or too long a look towards Rey, perhaps — but she saw the curl of his maw as Chewie bared teeth. The rumble of his protesting growl was so low and sudden that Rey had only enough time to leap at Poe as he turned towards the brute in her front seat before Chewie lunged.

The clack of his teeth snapping at Poe’s arm punctuated the flying froth of his mouth and the deafening roar of a bark as Chewie bucked against the car door, rocking the Falcon on its wheels as Poe fell back.

He tumbled, Rey lunging past him as Chewie roared, a deafening succession of barks making even Rey flinch.

Poe fell, dropping slower than Rey thought natural, striking the pavement and bouncing a little.

Red-faced, she threw herself at the dog, shoving him backwards without concern for her own limbs.

“Stop!” she bellowed, hands sinking into miles of fur.

Mid-bark, Chewie diminished, his large head lolling towards her, jaw hanging open. Froth-daubed, his gaze cleared. He panted, offering only a confused look as if to ask why she was overreacting.

Rey gripped him, still.

Chewie’s breath beat moist and hot against her face, smelling of French fries and Alpo. The answering slobber as he laved at her cheek left a harmless, wet trail of drool.

“Dummy,” she said on her exhale, her heart hammering as she turned to find Poe bug-eyed on his arse, staring up at the dog.

Chewie “ruffed” in warning, butting his large head into Rey’s chin — his immediate hostility forgotten.

“Lie down,” she instructed, and the large dog obeyed, his chin resting on the window ledge, eyeing Poe with an implacable warning that didn’t entirely suggested he’d be forgotten if he tried to get too friendly again.

Rey clutched the scruff of Chewie’s neck, leaning into his ear and saying, “Behave, you big furball.” He licked his nose, giving her a baleful turn of his eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to Poe. “He can be rather territorial. Are you okay?”

Poe tipped his head, giving her a once-over. “I’ve heard of over-protective big brothers before. Fathers with shotguns and the like —”

He didn’t quite get her meaning.

Rey flushed.

“The car,” she explained, sheepish. “He’s protective of the car.”

Poe gaped, trying to process this new information and coming up short.

She side-stepped an entire explanation, trying to figure out what she ought to be doing with her hands. “He came with it,” she managed. “I know that sounds insane, but the day the Falcon came to my garage — I mean, the garage I work at — so did Chewie.”

Awkward, she extended her hand, drool-streaked and stuck with Chewie’s fur. “He only goes full Cujo for the car.” She was repeating herself now. Lovely. Rey wiped her hand down her jeans. Offered him a hand up that wasn’t completely gross.

“I’m fine,” he managed. “It’s nothing. No worries.” He eyed the dog. “Cujo, huh? Never cared for Stephen King. See enough scary stuff on the job.”

Given that his limbs were still attached, Poe rolled to his knee and brushed himself off. “I’ll just — keep an eye on him from a distance, then.”

He claimed a seat on a step a few feet away, slumping a little as he balled his fists. Steadying himself. Rey, embarrassed, apologized again, only turning as a lady dressed in a smart pantsuit pushed open the door of the Gather House, flanked by a young man in uniform.

The mayor wore her experience in the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, but rather than weary apprehension, something subtle and sharp lingered behind clear eyes. When she smiled, it was without teeth as if she meant to appear less threatening, but still a cut above the common; a regal smile. Rey couldn’t help but sense as if they woman had seen things, in her day: had fought her battles and taken her losses, but hadn’t sacrificed her grace in the process.

Both women met halfway on the steps, her escort trailing behind.

“Rey,” Mayor Organa addressed her, taking her hands in hers as if she were an old friend recently come home. “Welcome.”

Something caught in her throat at that, as if behind it trailed the understanding that this was a return, of sorts — a pilgrimage she hadn’t realized she was making.

Rey cleared her throat, ducking her head to hide her flush. “Thank you --“

“Leia, please,” she offered. “Come in. Lieutenant Finn can dog-sit for a moment while we talk. I’m sure it’s been a long journey from — Nevada, was it?”

Twenty-seven hours and two and a half days driving, but curiosity made for an unrelenting fuel-source: determination was a fire in her veins that spurred her past sleep and through drive-throughs, feeding Chewie her fries as her hamburgers cooled in her lap while the world around them turned from desert to mountains to plains. Her weariness must have showed.

The young man threw only a curious look at Poe, still sitting on the step, and the dog hanging out of the car. Poe shook his head, waving the younger man off when he, too, offered to help.

Rey nodded, forcing a smile to be polite.

Lieutenant Finn straightened, giving her a self-assured sort of nod that didn’t spark the confidence in her that he likely thought it did. Not when Chewbacca was involved, nor her car.

“I’m sure you have questions.” The Mayor searched her, as if looking for her grandfather in her features. Chewie’s bark startled the four of them into action. A glance back to Chief Dameron and his lingering attention on them was enough to prompt Leia to usher her inside. “Let’s talk in private.”

—

The Mayor’s office had a sparse functionality to it that suggested years of loyal use with a near-militaristic penchant for organization. Rey claimed a swivel seat before her desk, weaving her fingers together to stop the nervous impulse to fidget.

A tin box sat on Leia’s desk between stacks of file folders and an old Underwood that the Mayor was still putting to use for correspondence, it seemed. 

Leia’s gaze drifted briefly to the window, past the blinds and to the outside world. Behind the paned glass, the sky seemed to dim in increments, along with her cheer.

As the moments in silence dragged to minutes, Rey stole a loud breath, the chair squeaking as she shifted. She flinched.

“I passed through Junari Point on the way into town,” she hazarded, her voice two octaves too high to be normal. “I hadn’t realized why someone from Hanna City was handling the paperwork for the estate — until I saw it, that is — how small it is.”

Leia lifted her eyebrows, that far-off look settling on her like a mantle as she turned to face her.

“You drove through?”

Rey opened her mouth to dispel any suspicions that she’d been snooping around, but something halted her: Leia’s surprise, perhaps.

“Well,” Leia supposed. “I suppose — Junari is a deceptive hamlet: the town centre isn’t big enough to hold its own police station or fire department, but the farms that make up the town are bigger than Hanna City.” She raised her eyebrows. “Used to be a lovely vacation spot.”

Rey wasn’t entirely sure how far back that was, but she’d give it a hundred years at least. She cleared her throat.

It was a moment further before she realized the mayor was trying to make a joke. A little tension unspooled between her shoulders. She forced another smile.

“Harvest festival must be starting soon,” Leia continued.

She swallowed, nodding. “I saw the signs.”

Leia folded her hands atop her blotter. “Old tradition, that. One that’s yet to die out. Junari’s been a farming community for as long as its been around, and without too much intervention from Hanna City, they like to do things the way they always have out there.”

“Mennonite?” Rey asked.

Leia frowned. Shook her head and forced a small smile. “Traditional.”

Rey opened her mouth to feign small talk, eyes everywhere save the tin box that Leia’s hands now rested on, as if waiting to present her with its contents. There was a weight to the moment that she found herself trying to skirt, letting her nerves and anticipation run away with her mouth so she might staunch the butterflies before they got into it for real:

“They don’t get many visitors, I take it.”

Whatever remained in that tin was evidence enough of Rey’s ties to this man who’d once been known as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and some part of her found the prospect of lifting the lid terrifying: like it might be disproven before it was made fact; that she’d travelled all this way for nothing.

“Not for the festival, no. Or ever, for that matter. Goes on for about a week before the last harvest,” Leia continued. “What with climate change being what it is, seems that the season ends a little earlier each year.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Every night after the sun falls, there’s something going on out there — either in town, or down in the Hollow. You must have passed it — the tree line? No signs out there until you’re past the old sawmill, then I suppose you’ve gone too far, as it were.” She chuffed a laugh.

“I wasn’t planning on staying very long,” Rey admitted.

The plan was to get in, clear out the house, find what evidence of the family that had left her behind, and go back home as quickly as possible, perhaps with the ammunition to track her parents down before they turned up. Her muscles twitched with the need to start — the first step to stitching the number of loose ends of her life together into a cohesive pattern, like she’d become a sweater unravelled over the years with an interesting patchwork of darning holding her together.

Leia’s interest didn’t falter.

“Did you stop by the farmstead?” she asked.

“No! No, I wasn’t sure where I was going, so —”

Leia waved it off. “The Kenobi property is yours, now. You have every right to be curious.”

Bracing herself, Rey chose her words with care. “This is nothing I expected.” She chewed the inside of her mouth, hesitating. “It’s all rather sudden,” she admitted, her chest tight and too full. Rey swallowed the sensation down. “I --“ Her breath hitched.

Something softened in the mayor’s expression, a motherly affectation turning her tender. It made it hard to breathe.

“I don’t remember him,” she said finally, her voice tight. “I wish I did, but —” she shook her head.

Leia nodded, softening. The tin box made a scraping noise as she pushed it towards Rey.

“I’ve found that memory can be deceptive, the farther away we get from the moments that shaped our childhoods. Sometimes, a little irrefutable evidence can solidify the things we’ve grown uncertain of.”

Like having a family at all, Rey swallowed the lump in her throat. Nodded.

Still, she didn’t touch the tin. It was a little rusted around the base, and no bigger than a cigar box: a faded bit of art on the lid suggested its original use had been intended for toffee.

“Should I give you a moment?” Leia asked, pushing back in her chair.

Rey shook her head, words clotting like cream in her throat, making them stick. There were a number of things that left her aching: the possibility that there were answers here for her, and the possibility that they wouldn’t be the answers she was looking for, nor wanted.

“You’re certain,” Rey managed. “That my mother and father were unreachable?”

Leia smiled sadly. “I never knew them, Rey,” she said, reaching for Rey’s hand across the blotter where it rested on the table, and stopping short as she thought better of it.

She explained, “When Obi-Wan moved to Junari Point in the eighties, he arrived without a wife — without children. He bought that piece of land and built his house up from the dirt like so many folks do out here, from nothing.” Her smile turned sad. “He was a good man, Rey, but he settled here alone and with the intention of remaining alone, though I never knew why that was. We were fortunate to even find some evidence of you at all. The property and its holdings would have gone to auction if we hadn’t — and sixty acres is nothing to shake a stick at in these parts.”

She sucked in a breath, nodding. The question that plagued her, leaving her uncertain and anchored to her chair — preventing her from flipping the lid on her origins — stayed her hand a little longer.

“The house isn’t much,” Leia continued, folding and unfolding her hands. “It might’ve been a thriving farmstead, once, had Obi-Wan managed its upkeep better. There is a barn on the property, which is also well-past its prime.”

She took a breath.

“I don’t want to mislead you, Rey — he wasn’t in good form, towards the end. The house —”

That open/close of her hands again. Rey took it as a gesture of futility, as if Leia were somehow embarrassed on Obi-Wan's behalf of the state he’d left it.

“Is it habitable?” she asked, watching a muscle tick in the older woman’s jaw.

It was a moment further before she bowed her head, saying only, “Yes.”

It wasn’t a _good_ sort of habitable, Rey gathered.

She looked down at the tin box. They both did.

Leia waited with the patience of a saint, motherly concerning lining her eyes as she waited for Rey to make herself ready. Outside, a car passed, its muffler announcing itself to the street. All else possessed the quiet that made her pounding pulse loud in her ears.

“My parents —“ she whispered, as if trying to keep the world righted for a little longer. “You said that I was Obi-Wan's only next of kin —”

Leia reached for her then, squeezing her hand with a strength that surprised her. “You’re the only one we could find, dear,” she said. “I promise.”

A little knot of tension uncoiled at that, loosening in Rey’s chest and taking with it the lump in her throat. Her breath fluttered on the exhale, as if in knowing as much — having it confirmed for her face to face — kept the dream that they would come back alive a little longer; that they would find her eventually. Rey’s smile struggled at the corners, fragile but undiminished.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Leia nodded, not pressing her further to explain the troubles of her small life with all her worries.

Rey unlatched the lid, blinking back the sting in her eyes and knowing that the urge to cry was the result of some small relief; that hope was not yet lost. Rey opened the tin.

What greeted her was a humble offering: a photograph of a bearded man in worn work clothes, an arm propped up on a shovel and backed by a waist-high fence of corn that might’ve been yellow or might’ve been little more than green shoots. The date was printed at the corner in bleary orange — the photo a print stained with age and a few water spots. Midlife had left his handsomeness untouched, his body lean with muscles accustomed to long days. Shirt tucked in. Boots soft but clean. Smiling.

She looked for herself in his face, and squinting at the photo nearly up to her nose, she thought she could see some similarities in the way he grinned; the shape of his mouth and the crinkling of his eyes — but that’s where it ended.

“Same accent as you too,” Leia offered.

The other contents of the tin were a smattering of records: the deed to the land, dated to 1982, a few yellowed receipts, the keys to the property, as well as the one damning thing that connected her to this stranger: a birth certificate. Hers.

Rey brushed her fingers over the calligraphy, trying to understand how something so familiar could at the same time be so foreign. She didn’t dare speak it out loud, as if unable to claim it for herself:

A name. Also hers. The one she was born to. 

She put the contents back swiftly; the keys to her pocket. Nodded to Leia and managed a, “thank you.”

Shoved back too hard from her chair so that it screed its protest, knocking one of the bookshelves at her back. Embarassed, Rey flushed. Ducked her head but couldn’t quote manage an apology. She hastened to leave, but Leia rose with her — reaching as if to have her linger a time longer.

“Do you want someone to drive out with you? I could have Chief Dameron dispatch one of his lieutenants as an escort — Finn, perhaps —”

Rey shook her head, a nagging thought fluttering at her as if it were a moth and she was a bulb. She wouldn’t give voice to it yet, choosing instead to lock it away for further consideration later when she was alone, and Chewie’s bulk was able to support her if she needed to use the beast as an oversized tissue to cry into.

Some part of her wanted to ask the Mayor why her grandfather was in possession of her birth certificate, and why had it not gone on with her parents, wherever they might’ve been. Another part of her wondered at the possibility that she’d know the farm once she stood before it — would it trigger something she’d lost among the years and the sands of Jakku like some other part of her past that had spilled through her fingers.

A small headache was beginning to build behind her eyes.

That was not something she wanted an audience for.

She hitched her bravest smile onto her face, knowing full well that its brightness would fall short of her gaze, and prepared to get her shit together in a way that would be more challenging than ever before; went as far as to suck down a lungful of air so she wouldn’t squeak through whatever excuse she managed so she might ease from of Mayor Organa’s office without being horribly rude — when Leia said,

“There’s something else you should know.”

Concern notched into the Mayor’s features; some heavier confession on standby. It was almost admirable how the older woman managed to hold her in place, waiting to see if Rey was prepared for whatever that unbidden truth was: like Leia was letting her brace for impact.

“I didn’t want to tell you over the phone. It didn’t seem right, given the circumstances, and especially since you were so willing to drive all the way out here. I thought it might be better having a face to face conversation about how he was found.”

Rey noticed that Leia was wearing a large, two-bulbed ring on her left hand. It was enormous compared to the woman’s knobbed fingers — a bit of ostentatious blue and gold that could snap a person’s nose if she ever resorted to fisticuffs.

It was the thing she focused on to ground herself when the Mayor apologized for the extra dollop of weight landing square in the chest:

“I regret to inform you of the circumstances of Mr. Kenobi’s passing, Rey: there’s nothing about this that’s pleasant.”

Something sank in her at that; striking like a plumb line at the bottom of a deep, dry well. Her fingers gripped the tin box, making new dents in its already battered surface.

Leia took a breath. “We’re still looking into it. We want to be sure that we can rule out foul play.”

Her voice seemed to manifest from far away. Rey felt her mouth form the words; felt the rumble in her chest as she asked, “What happened?”

She’d imagined that he’d passed in his sleep — and old man, comfortable in his bed. She’d imagined that perhaps he sat down for tea one afternoon and didn’t stand back up when the possibility of a long rest for weary bones became more pleasant than biscuits. Rey imagined these things, because what did she know of the dying other than that they faded in hospital beds, monitors reduced from beeps to flatlines.

Careful. Peaceful. Sanitized.

Leia explained, and as she did, there was a strange, high-pitched ringing that filled Rey’s ears, allowing only snatches of the conversation to register. Her vision tunnelled at the edges, narrowing to that single spot on Leia’s left ring finger on what might’ve been an eccentric bit of wedding jewelry. She caught pieces, of course:

Words delivered in a gentler tone than they deserved:

Lacerations. Naked. Corn field. Markings on his body. Blood.

“Suicide?” Rey croaked.

Leia’s exhalation was short. Sharp. “We’re can’t be certain until the coroner’s report comes back, and we needed your authorization to —”

They hadn’t even buried him yet, she realized.

A chill worked its way through her chest, her fingers locked into a white-knuckled holding pattern on the box — this last anchor to Obi-Wan's life.

She nodded. Autopsy. Yes. Paperwork. Yes.

Leia stood, gripped her shoulder briefly, but it was a moment more before Rey reached for that failing spot of warmth where the Mayor’s fingers had touched her. It was a moment further before she realized she’d been left alone as Leia went to collect whatever legal necessities she needed to ensure the investigation into Obi-Wan's death might continue. She’d authorized that.

It sat heavily on her, being able to do this for him though he never knew her — a pall on her day that deadened the senses.

These disparate elements notched together, strengthened by proximity, and as the scent of ozone filled to room again as the Mayor rejoined her, Rey looked up with more ringing clarity than she felt.

“Do you think he --“ She stopped herself. “Is it possible?”

Was he sad, she wanted to ask? Was he lonely? Was he sick?

Leia searched her expression, and as if she found some new resolve there, she appeared to come to a conclusion about her — one Rey wasn’t entirely certain of, but the mayor’s level appraisal and unflinching willingness to give her some truth was something she could appreciate. This woman wasn’t about to dick her around to spare her feelings, regardless of how sensitive this all seemed. Leia, for whatever reason, thought that she could take it — whatever it was.

“Something happened to him over time,” Leia said. “It’s just not clear what. We are leaving the investigation open, regardless — my best officers are on it.” She mentioned something further about an escort to the Kenobi farmstead, but Rey begged off.

“I can have someone out to check on you, if you need them.”

Rey licked her lips, tasting salt.

Something told her that if she asked the question again, the answer offered would have some of its diplomacy shaved off.

“Is it safe?” Rey asked. “The house?”

Leia fixed her with another measuring look. “It’s seen better days,” she said. “I suspect structurally there’s nothing wrong with it, but Obi-Wan was all but entirely reclusive in his last ten years. Kept to himself. Wasn’t intent on mingling with the locals, and as such, they might not be entirely forthcoming with you if you start asking questions.”

Pre-emptive embarrassment heated her face.

“The house has strong foundations. Perhaps the roof leaks a bit. It’s weathered its share of storms. But it’s not a good pace for a solitary young woman to be living in, what with how old Ben kept it in the last ten years.”

“Ben?” Rey asked.

“A nickname,” Leia explained. “One born of affection. Used to say he forgot his given name in his declining years, but I think he liked the less exotic moniker; better fit for Junari Point.” She measured her. “You’ll find that the town strips you down to the most basic.”

“I’m not unaccustomed to living on the spare,” Rey said, convincing herself that no matter how bad the house might’ve gotten, she’d likely seen worse: the foster system and its various pitfalls had seen to her thorough education of the rougher parts of Jakku, and Niima for that matter.

“And I’m not unfamiliar with hard work,” she said. “I need this. I need to know.” She swallowed. “My parents — my family. If there was any clues as to who they were — ” _Why they left_. Rey let the confession hang, unsaid.

Leia offered a gesture with her hands that suggested she understood there wasn’t anything she could do to persuade her otherwise. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Rey.” Resigned acceptance, a little sadness: a knowledge of better, happier times settling into the lines of her face and dimming her smile. “But you don’t have to do this all by yourself.”

Rey offered her own restrained peace offering in return. Something twisted in her chest at that, making her hesitate. Strained and a little apologetically, she managed, “It’s how I’ve always done things.”

Easier in some ways, and harder and others. She had Chewie, besides.

She stood, tucking the tin box and its contents against her hip, and extending her hand. “You’ll let me know if something turns up with the investigation?”

If there was some new tension in Leia’s shoulders, she hid it well as she rose to clasp Rey’s hand with a strength she hadn’t expected.

“Of course,” was all she said; the reserved poise of a politician’s facade carefully arranged to hang as austere-casual as she could manage.

Rey turned back once to glance over her shoulder, finding Leia’s gaze had drifted to some far distant point beyond her windows again as she lingered, appearing for all the universe as if she was thinking of something or someone from a long time ago. Rey thought to herself that the mayor had the bearing of a mother who’d lost a final, quiet argument with their child — not wanting her to leave, but unable to let her do anything other than let her go.


	4. Razed and Salted

The address crinkled in her pocket where Rey had stuffed it for safekeeping. Chewie had negotiated his way into the front seat, and after thanking Finn for looking after her dog, she consulted the map she picked up at the corner gas before heading back into town with a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

She could have gone to the hardware store in Hanna City, but something prompted her to double back the way she’d came:

Mostly, she wanted to see the town where Obi-Wan had spent his formative years — or rather, the town he’d avoided in his formative years in spite of living there. Part of her wanted to know his people — _her_ people — to see what might be evidence to the ties she had to this small hamlet in middle America.

She’d need supplies to negotiate the clear-out, and if she wanted to be methodical about it, she’d need to be able to haul enough of the house’s contents to be able to separate things into the auctionable and the salvageable. Mostly, she didn’t want to be gone from Jakku so long that she missed anything, or anyone, that might come looking for her. It made expediency a priority; efficiency paramount. Still, the thought left a restlessness in her limbs that she might’ve attributed to the caffeine, if she was doing anything more than glowering at the cup in its holder.

Chewie took one sniff at the cup, and his answering huff of disdain was enough to put her off of drinking the sludge.

She drove back into Junari Point with the foul brew sloshing against its lid, Chewie’s head out the window, and a red X marking a point on the map off a road in the middle of what appeared to be nowhere. She had coordinates. There was an end destination. This was an archaeological excavation into the past, she reminded herself: she would dig into her own prehistory and come up with some clues as to her evolution — a history left untold.

“Science,” she muttered, turning off the long stretch of corn-flanked road onto Main Street, the drowsy town looming around her in its dreary disrepair as if she were enlivening its former spirits just by being there.

Parking across the street from Syndulla & Son Hardware, she hip-checked the door closed, balancing the gross coffee in one hand while flicking through a list of items on her phone with the other hand: tarp, rope, garbage bags, packing tape, dumpster rental, etcetera and ad nauseam.

Chewie hopped out to stretch his legs, ambling with a few faltering steps into a low trot that made his belly swing from side to side as he hopped the curb. Rey ditched to coffee in a trash bin that was perilously close to overflowing and waited for him to do his business on the mailbox sitting road-side.

She eyed the door: dust marred the inside of the shop, but she could see the hump of a body leaning over the counter behind the register. It gave her the distinctive impression that, as the person straightened, they were taking notice of the stranger outside as well. A moment later, they blurred into nothing as they vanished deeper into the aisles.

“Sit, Chewie,” she instructed. “Wait here for me, okay?”

He yawned in response, hurtling himself onto the sidewalk and into the shade while Rey pushed open the door to the tinkling of a bell and the low warble of an old transistor radio somewhere in the back.

She paused, looking up for the bell but catching something unexpected: a spare bit of graffiti marred the lintel, just over her head. The gouge that marred the wood strip was hardly more than three inches in height and two across: twin circles notched into one another, bisected by a sharp downward stroke made hastily with a tool unintended for this purpose. The scratches surrounding it suggested the marking had taken more than just one attempt.

She frowned. Apparently the kids in this town weren’t carving their initials anymore. Maybe that had gone out of fashion along with arrow-pierced hearts.

Four aisles ran into a long, narrow shop. Someone in the back had bothered to turn on the incandescents, but grimy natural light kept the front of the shop illuminated. A workshop occupied the back of the space, elevated on a half-step to a second floor and what appeared to be the storage area beyond.

She ventured into the assortment of goods lining the second aisle, finding the tarps next to the paint thinner. The rest of the store was similarly disarranged, but she managed to orient herself — collecting a few of the items from her list and leaving them on the counter to pay.

Checking the bulletin behind the cash, she noticed a sign for large trash removal written in Sharpie on a piece of eight and a half by eleven letterhead. Even squinting, she couldn’t make out the name of the advertisement’s owner without hopping over the counter, though she leaned forward as far as she could, trying to make it out.

A glance to the street confirmed what she felt: that she was the only soul for miles in this ghost town and there wasn’t anyone venturing out to help her in her mounting frustration.

Likewise,the storefront remained abysmally empty as no one came out to greet her or ring up her purchases, even as she dinged the countertop bell for service. Twice.

Checking that Chewie remained in the shade by the door, leaving a small puddle of drool beneath his chin, she took a few hesitant steps to peer into the back of the store, waiting for the door to swing open and someone to come out while proceeding to clear her throat. When that didn’t work, she picked up several items on the counter and replaced them loudly.

Still: nothing.

Her heel began bouncing, a nervous energy owing to the uptick in her irritation as she drummed her fingers against her folded arms.

“Hello?” Rey called finally.

Silence returned to her.

She peeked around the counter and down the first aisle, and with some trepidation, checked the others as well to make sure that an errant sales clerk wasn’t lurking behind a ladder or mop and bucket set.

A scuffling sound emerged from the back, followed by the distant murmur of disembodied voices. She waited, hesitating until finally her kicking heartbeat forced her feet into stubborn, forward motion.

“Hello? Anyone there?” she called again.

The place smelled of ancient dust and musty cardboard, old grease and spilled paint. The lights hummed the closer she got to them, and passing beneath them, she noticed a number of sacrificed flies who’d thought to venture too closely to the light.

The store’s offering had sat for some time, but it had the necessities, from what she could tell. Doubled stickers suggested that the packaged hardware had been bought from elsewhere and re-ticketed at a higher markup. She reserved her discomfort, inching towards the workshop door that stood ajar at the back, music floating and ghostly from within: a John Denver song, she thought.

Rey waited, her nerves getting the better of her as she listened hard for some sign of life from within.

She was about to call out again when a movement at the farthest point in her peripheral vision caught her attention, causing her to snap her attention left. She frowned, seeing nothing other than a selection of ropes, chains, and cords sitting on spindles in haphazard array on the floor.

When she turned back, she lurched at the sudden, silent appearance of two figures: one peered down a dirt-smudged nose with an imperious self-assurance that belied his low-slung denims and faded workman’s flannel, and the other hunched over the worktable, chewing on a blade of wheat and staring with a flinted scrutiny that slivered Rey’s surprise into bristling pique.

The moment was short-lived, however, as Rey stumbled back a step, gasping as she fumbled her phone. It struck the tiled floor with a sickening, solid sound that echoed hollowly from its screen and spelled nothing good.

The severe-looking red-headed man before her only raised his eyebrow, peering from her to her cellphone on the floor with restrained disdain, but remained otherwise utterly still — unruffled while her heart attempted to punch its way through her chest.

His companion was the first to move, stepping off the riser and bending past her to collect the device with a frown. Even standing beside her, Rey had to crane her neck to look up at the enormous woman.

The blond stroked an inordinately large thumb over the screen, offering it to her with a level, yet calculating assessment in her cold, blue eyes.

“Not sure what good that will do you,” said the redhead. “Cellular signal’s piss poor in these parts.” His scrutiny was a drill. “Ma’am,” he added.

“Not even a single bar,” his friend agreed, handing her back the phone.

Instead of accepting it, Rey took a step back to better take her in: a regular Brienne of Tarth.

If Rey figured it, the redhead was the brains and the blond was the muscle, and she couldn’t rightly say she preferred one to the other.

“Well,” she said, breathy and trying to ground herself back into her body instead of shrinking into the floor, “at least it’s not broken.” She forced a laugh. Neither joined her. She pocketed the phone, not even glancing at the screen.

“You’d be better off with a landline,” the redhead continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “The old Kenobi place has one, doesn’t it?”

The blond’s gaze slid to his, a muscle twitching in her jaw that might’ve passed for a smile on any other planet. Mostly, it made the slither of cold that slipped through her lungs made it feel as if her breath would freeze before it left her lungs.

Her heart gave a chug of surprise and familiarity, and unable to hide it, Rey felt the heat spread across her cheeks the longer she gawped.

“You’re his kin,” he continued. “Aren’t you.”

Her heel struck the side of a shovel, making it wobble where it rested against one of the shelves.

Moving too quick to brace it, it hammered the others with a clatter that reverberated in her teeth. She snatched at it, thinking it good as a makeshift weapon, and she hugged it to her as if she meant to add it to her purchases.

Hunched against further disruption to the quiet, a heady tension draping the air in the store, she managed, “How did you know that?”

They exchanged a look that spoke volumes, but the redhead didn’t really convey any sympathy when he took off his hat.

“We wanted to offer our condolences,” he said. “Saw you drive through town earlier this morning looking a little lost. If you don’t mind my saying, strangers in these parts don’t go unnoticed.”

Her voice cracked, “Are you — Syndulla and —?” She trailed off.

That was stupid. The pair looked about as related as an aardvark and an elephant.

“Change of ownership,” the redhead said.

“Manners,” the blond injected, chewing.

He nodded to his companion, introducing her as, “Phasma.” A nickname, surely.

The man held his hat to his chest, sketching an abbreviated bow. “Name’s Armitage, but everyone calls me Hux.”

The enormous hand that Phasma held out to her was calloused, scarred through the knuckles, and as meaty as a ham hock. Rey took it with trepidation, finding her grip less unnerving that the brief jolt of contact.

“I didn’t know him,” she heard herself saying, pulling back her hand and struggling not to wipe it over her jeans. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”

He glanced at her motley collection of artifacts she’d scrounged from the store, arranged in a heap on the front counter.

“Guttin’ it, aren’t you?” he asked. “The house? Not a bad idea. The real value’s in the land, anyhow.” 

Phasma’s head snapped left, her look of surprise fleeting, but Rey saw it: she suspected that Hux wasn’t supposed to be making such critical assessment’s of a dead man’s holdings.

A muscle began ticking in Rey’s jaw. There was something unnerving about the way the pair continued to stare, hostility mingling with curiosity keeping her pinned as if she was an insect squirming against a board and were about ready to stab her through to make sure she didn’t escape.

She backed up a step, shoving her hands into her back pockets in a caricature of relaxation. Squeezed her shoulders into a shrug. Forced a smile.

Keeping her back to the front of the store as they tracked her, Rey moved and the pair followed,absorbing all the light in the aisle. The blond — Phasma — blotted out the back half of the store as she advanced. Both were straight-backed, occupying as much space as the corridor of ancient farming artifacts would allow.

“Why do you ask?” she asked with forced casualness.

Hux’s gaze didn’t leave hers, though his mouth twisted up at the corners.

“You have the look of a lady who’s fixing to leave about as quick as she got here.”

She stopped, her heart chugging its rapid rhythm, but opting to hold her ground. Swallowing, she looked between them, determined to remain unafraid despite their intimidation. They weren’t outright trying to scare her, she suspected: it was just their way, and though they made her uncomfortable, there was no reason to be so skittish. She’d dealt with and dispatched enough scoundrels out in Jakku in her day. Rey held her ground, cocked her head to the side, and braced the shovel to her side, rocking it on its point.

Hux notched his thumbs into his pockets, but quit advancing.

He looked over her haul of items for the house with no particular care.

“What are you planning on doing with the farm, then?” Phasma asked.

Rey lifted her chin. “I’m a mechanic,” she offered, keeping her expression open and her face bright. “Not a farmer.” She offered an apologetic half-shrug. “No real use for all that wheat.”

Their smiles were as tight as the skin along Hux’s jaw.

“Corn,” he corrected.

There remained something sharp about him — too much swagger for her to care for, and too keen to be innocently inquiring about the state of the Kenobi property. He was digging for salvage: some sweet morsel of information — to what ends, she wasn’t entirely sure, but she didn’t like it. Or him. And Phasma was apt to snap her spine in half if she looked at either of them the wrong way, Rey suspected, so she checked her reservations and smiled sweetly instead.

“Corn,” she repeated.

A beat. Rey scarcely took a breath.

“You seen the old Kenobi place, Phasma?” Hux asked. “Seems like a lot of work for one person.”

She lifted both shoulders to her ears, forcing her cheeks to dimple. “Shouldn’t be too terrible, providing I can find an industrial-sized dumpster for rent someplace hereabouts. And —” she gestured to her pile of stuff. “Hopefully pay for all this.”

Phasma’s lips pressed into a thin, white line, but taking pity on her, she lumbered behind the cash, proceeding to ring up Rey’s collection of supplies.

“Thank you,” Rey gushed. Her heart jackhammered into a steadier rhythm.

Hux tipped his head, knocking into the countertop beside her. The sudden movement rattled the entirety of her belongings, which came to a whopping fifty-two dollars and sixteen cents, which she dug out of her back pocket and left as exact change on the countertop as Phasma stacked everything into a passable pile for her to carry.

“No bags when you drive a truck.”

“Right.” She didn’t care. She’d drag the lot of it behind her if it got her out of there quicker.

Phasma and Hux shared a look — an entire, unspoken conversation passing between them that Rey pretended to ignore as she shovelled the various articles into her arms.

“Snoke could help you with your dumpster situation,” Hux offered. “He’s got one to lend. We could bring it out to you tomorrow. Deliver it directly.” He shrugged, non-plussed and concealing another half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Interested?”

\--

She all but hissed for her dog as she shouldered her way from the hardware store, tossing a hasty look back to see if the pair of local thugs followed. The rope unspooled, sliding to the side, and swearing as she tried to catch it, Rey spun to find Chewie far from where she’d left him — perched in the truck bed, his eyes half-shut and tongue lolling from his mouth.

Her feet stammered to a halt in the middle of the street, the rope sliding from her hands altogether as she stalled, taking in the figure that was responsible for her dog’s rapture:

Tall and lean, clad in faded black with his hair curling over his collar, the man struck a strange contrast against the dingy town: like he was cut from shadows and stood in defiance of daylight. A somber turn to his mouth pulled the corners into a small frown as he leaned against the Falcon’s side, one hand reaching into the cab. When he drew back, something weighted his shoulders. Whatever it was, it seemed like a heavy mantle.

A slithering certainty that she’d seen him before whispered her forward, pulled towards him with mounting irritation as she saw what he held between his fingers:

The set of gold-plated dice, brushed across by his thumb, that he’d pulled from her rearview mirror. He had impossibly long fingers — a pallor to his skin that made it seem like he wore gloves often. Strong hands. Corded muscle in his forearms. Even the fabric of his shirt hugged the hard flesh of his shoulders in a way that suggested he was no stranger to the fields.

The sound of protest caught in her throat as he turned his eyes up to greet her — an expression on his face as reaching as the darkness between stars where light failed to penetrate. He didn’t smile. He didn’t stop scratching Chewie’s sweet spot — and that the dog hadn’t tried to take of his arm like he’d done Poe’s? Rey’s heart kicked its rhythm up a notch.

His attentions waned — the results of marking her anger most probably — and in the lull, Chewie took the opportunity to lick the man’s hands, nuzzling him for further affection.

A haunted look fled from his expression, taking the frown with it as he pushed back his cap:

The man that held her gaze was more earthly than his first impression offered: a short, black beard and moustache hid some of his expression, but his lips were pink and wide, and his eyes a rich chocolate brown — not the creature of phantasm that he’d struck her as when she’d first seen him in her rearview when she’d driven through town the first time.

When he spoke, the earth didn’t shift, and her heart didn’t stop, and Rey realized with mounting irritation at herself that she was a little bit pissed that Chewie had decided that this man who was stealing her shit was worth the extra cuddles — and yet, she still found herself drawing forward a step to hear that rumble of self-deprecating curiosity in his voice:

“They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.”

It took her a moment to realize he was talking about her car.

She sniffed, marched the rest of the way, and tossed the pile of her new belongings into the truck bed. Chewie’s tail flopped back and forth happily. Traitor.

She looked at the man askance, feeling the weight of his gaze following her.

“You modded it,” he observed.

Something about the note of appreciation in his voice gave her pause. She raked him over, eyes narrowed and trying to maintain her suspicions about the people of this bizarre backwater and their forward customs and invasive inquiries about her business in what they all clearly thought of as _their_ town.

She sucked in a deep breath, trying to shake the spike of embarrassment. Why her heart continued pounding was not worth the consideration, she suspected. She eyed him. Watched his hands.

“It’s my pet project,” she admitted. “I’ve done enough to ensure that she keeps running despite her advanced years.”

Nodding at the dice, she asked, “You going to put those back?” 

The jut of his tongue as he licked his lip snagged at her attention; a small smile quirking his mouth as he shifted, lifting himself from where he’d gotten comfortable.

“Pardon me,” he said. “Ma’am.”

Something about the way he stretched, re-hanging the dice where he’d retrieved them, held her rooted: watching the bunch and shift of his back, the long-line carved by his torso, and the hang of his denim over hips that had no business peeking out from the half-inch strip that showed when he raised his arm.

She felt her face heat, and she turned away.

“Chewie,” she said, snapping her fingers as if it would move the wooly mammoth from his preferred spot.

“You’re Obi-Wan's granddaughter,” he observed aloud. “What’s your name?”

She yanked open the driver’s side door, pausing as the man resumed his perch with his elbows on the Falcon’s side. Putting distance between them gave her room to breathe, but not enough that she couldn’t see for herself the strain of his shirt along his arms.

“Everyone seems to know that,” she groused. “How is it that everyone seems to know that?”

He didn’t smile, but something lit in his eyes: the slow catch of embers amidst coal.

With a helpless gesture, he begged off her ire as if requesting patience.

“News travels quickly when folks don’t have much else to occupy themselves.”

She left the door open, joining him at the back of the car now that the truck bed separated them — the few feet of distance enough to feel less dwarfed by his imposing height and the nagging feeling that she should know this man, somehow.

It wasn’t a warm sensation.

“I’m Ben,” he offered with a nod. No smile. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

There was more sincerity in those few words than both Hux and Phasma had managed to scrape together, but it wasn’t enough to leave her disarmed. Something about him left her unsettled, a feeling not unlike deja-vu making her insides turn wobbly when his mouth quirked at her reticence.

Lest he think her afraid, she swallowed her immediate apprehension and hedged a bet that he only appeared as well-intentioned as she imagined him to be.

“Rey.” She cleared her throat. “I’m Rey.” 

He nodded. “I know.”

There remained an ounce of intensity in his scrutiny that made it seem like he was trying to peer into her very soul.

She pressed her lips together as he peeked at the licence plate. “Hailing from Nevada, and traveling with your own personal body guard.” He nodded to Chewie, whose tail only flopped harder into the metal. “Guard dog isn’t a bad idea by half out there on the field: the house isn’t what it used to be,” he cautioned her. “Not much around these parts is. Better to be aware of what you’re getting into before you can’t get out.”

She bristled. “I’m not staying,” she countered.

“‘Course not,” he said, rising to full height. A shadow fell over his eyes from the brim of his hat, the scent of him carrying with the breeze and humidity: a mixture of soap and aftershave that reminded her of clove cigarettes and bonfire smoke. “You’re here to see the Kenobi place razed and salted.”

She balked, trying to fathom what he was leading to as he pushed away from the car, taking a step backwards as if to give himself extra distance to judge her by.

“What do you mean by that?” she demanded.

Perhaps he meant it to sound sympathetic, but to Rey, it sounded more like a warning: “Sometimes it’s best to let the past die.”

He searched her gaze for some reaction — like he was applying pressure to the thoughts that left her the most vulnerable, alone at night, when it was just her and her dreams of a mother and father who’d left her with promises she only half-remembered.

“I know what you want,” he said with a lilt of wry self-satisfaction. “I know your type — alone and looking for answers, but the dead don’t talk.”

It hit her low in the gut, her breath rushing out all at once in shock as if he’d struck her. The pain that followed was familiar, hollow and wrenching — making it hard to breathe. It took a moment for Rey to disconnect her thoughts from the reality this Ben person was familiar with:

Her parents weren’t dead, but her grandfather wasn’t so fortunate.

Tension dripped from her, leaving her fatigued, knowing that her fear had erupted from the foregone conclusion that he was talking about anyone other than Obi-Wan.

Rey shook her head, knowing she appeared more skittish than she ought, and turning from him just to same as if to hide how weak she suddenly felt. How foolish.

She clipped her returning, “No, I don’t suppose they do.”

Ben paused before her, hands hooked to his pockets. She’d been so transfixed by the low purr of his assessment that she hadn’t registered that he’d moved from the other side of the Falcon to loom over her. Up close, he radiated some form of silent devilry: lorded knowledge made a person powerful, especially one more familiar with the town and territories that the unsuspecting came to when burdened with questions that had few answers. Rey wasn’t certain how much was said about her behind cupped hands, but one thing was certain — for someone to have holed up in a farmhouse for so long, Obi-Wan's misbegotten progeny would surely inherit the brunt of every rumour and suspicion that once circulated about Kenobi himself. You reaped what you sowed, and all that.

She wished she’d been more prepared for the lukewarm reception. She wished she had a better grasp on what had gone wrong with him — out there in that old house, all alone.

No one was being forthcoming about it.

Ben watched her with an intensity. The play of emotions across her face must have shown because his tone softened as he said, “Nothing good comes from digging into the past. Better off leaving things buried, you ask me.”

She unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth, and raised her eyebrows — it was more confidence than she felt at the moment, but defiant, she raised her chin. “But I didn’t ask you,” she returned. “It’s also fortunate then that I brought my own shovel.”

She gave him a once over that suggested she wasn’t inviting help — his or anyone else’s.

His pause was drawn, but finally he huffed a breath, looking for all the world as if he’d decided that she would tear the world apart to get what she wanted, and he admired her for the trouble.

“Figures you wouldn’t be easily dissuaded,” he admitted.

“It seems to me that everyone in this town suddenly knows more about me than I know about myself,” she returned. “It doesn’t matter. I won’t be staying long anyhow.”

“I only meant that stubbornness seems a family trait.”

She did her best not to trip at that.

“You knew my grandfather?”

His attention followed her as he stepped back, sizing her up in a long sweep that felt a little like a caress from her ankle to collarbone.

She’d shown too much interest, she realized, clacking her jaw shut before she could assault him for whatever information he might have.

“Knew of him.” The frown remained — a small downturn of the mouth that lingered, as if he held something back.

Rey huffed a breath.

He half-frowned, asking as she made to squeeze past him, “Why the rush?”

Rey nearly tripped, clutching the side of the Falcon for support as he continued, “What’s waiting for you back home that you need to be so quick about your business?”

It struck a chord in her that made it seem that he already knew the answer to his own question: nothing. No-one.

Rey looked back only once before ripping the door open, giving him a tight smile that dimmed as she saw Hux and Phasma standing in the door of the hardware store, eavesdropping on their conversation. Hux even offered her a tip of his hat.

She narrowed her eyes at Ben, crunching her unsettled nerves into a compact little ball that she could better negotiate with a little open hostility. Searching for something scathing, the best she managed was a tight, slightly-pitched, “_My_ business. _Not_ yours.”

With that, she flung herself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door after her and glaring at the sideview mirror where Ben took up occupancy. He advanced, making to lean into the cab, but Rey shoved the key into the ignition, letting the engine’s roar overtake all rational thought and the possibility that he was about to apologize — the presumptuous ass.

She hit the gas before he could say anything, peeling away and throwing dirt and rocks behind her spinning tires, Chewie barking in surprise and delight.

In the rising cloud on the street behind, she could only just make out the dark shape of Benmaterializing — fractured one moment and then drawn together as if by sheer force of will, staring after her as she drove away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks for the kudos, comments, and reblogs! For my part, since this fic caters to such niche interests, I'm both surprised and grateful that anyone's reading it at all -- let alone enjoying it. (Truly, I am baffled and delighted.)
> 
> I'll see you just down the road in a week's time. We've got a date with the HOUSE. 
> 
> -october


	5. Five Windows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you need trigger warnings? Because here we begin.

Irritation ticked like the engine, her knuckles on the wheel and the map between her teeth to keep it from flying up into her face and blinding her. The corn rose on either side — neglected and drying to an impenetrable yellow wall as she took the corner to a street with no sign that she assumed was the country road leading to the Kenobi property. Thick, grey clouds collected over sparse trees in the distance, stirred into wisps by black branches. It was minutes before the peak of a brown roof eased into view beyond the furrows.

In the truck bed, Chewie announced they’d arrived with a bark, and Rey slowed the car to a creep before she could miss the drive. Tall grass choked a narrow lane, the corn persisting where the field overtook the wheel ruts, barely visible beneath the sparse undergrowth. In the distance, she saw a few naked trees flanking a dull grey blot against a whole lot of unforgiving nothing: a farmhouse that was barely more than a dirty smear against an endless horizon, the sky tinted orange with the sun behind so many clouds. She could just make out the black holes of windows, staring forlorn and winsome across the fields.

The closest house had been ten minutes back, and she’d been speeding — still seething over Ben and his assumptions while keeping her heel to the floor and her toes clenched to the pedal in anger.

She couldn’t say she cared for him, nor his cohorts. Couldn’t say she was much looking to running into them again, and the thought struck her that her grandfather might’ve shared similar feelings, once. If the three of them had been a sampling of what Junari Point had to offer, she wasn’t eager to investigate the rest.

She wouldn’t be scared off by unwelcoming townsfolk who took a little too much interest in her business, and she wouldn’t be driven away by a bit of hard work: there might still be clues in Obi-Wan's house that warranted her investigation; that offered answers to the mystery of who she was, and where she came from. She might yet nurture that sliver of hope that pointed her towards her parents — where they had gone, and where they were now.

She leaned forward, chest bumping the steering wheel and squinting through the dusty windshield as the Kenobi farmhouse loomed, wheels bumping over uneven ground as she slowed her approach — taking it in for the first time:

White paint flaked in strips, peeling from the siding like wilted skin sloughing off bone. Dust sat in its corners, marring the windows both inside and out, the whole of the building and its gallery leaning to the right by only a few degrees — making the slightest droop of the house’s foundations seem far worse than it likely was. A porch wrapped the whole of the building, but that too had seen better years: the steps hadn’t snapped — the rise to the front door slightly higher than it might’ve been in its prime; easy to twist an ankle or catch a few splinters on the rail for the trouble.

She stopped the car, the world around her filled with the quiet hush of corn bowed by a breeze that smelled of earth and impending rain. The stalks talked to each other in their peculiar language — a tongue she felt she might learn if she stayed listening to that particular hush for a time.

The ruin that sat before her was well past its former glories — a hollowed husk of history whose walls held secrets that the house might never share, and yet, she was willing to plead with it. She was willing to give it her time, if maybe it would show her some kindness.

“Please,” she whispered to no one in particular, shutting her eyes for a bit longer than a standard blink, and nurturing that small seed of hope that made her eyes sting with all the many possibilities of what roots she might lift from this soil. “Please don’t let it be empty.”

Stealing a breath, she eased from the Falcon with the keys clutched in her hand, approaching the front door with her breath held. Chewie’s warble of protest cut the silence as he scrabbled against the truck bed, begging her to be freed of the metal contraption that held him.

“Stay there a minute,” she told him, and he whined with plaintive insistence.

A weight settled on her, then — like the heaviness of someone’s attention drawing her gaze to the field at her left. Miles of corn swayed, bowing heavy fruit in welcome, but beyond that were silent acres of gold. An old, rotting barn sank off the field in the West. It bore the same stains of disuse as the rest of it.

The dark and still of Obi-Wan's house beckoned, her impending disturbance threatening the dust motes.

Rey blew out a breath. Hands on her hips, she eyed the second floor — the sagging gables and dirty windows, a few broken panes of glass, and the shadows beyond. Dirt and dead grass choked the lawn and caught at her legs, and Rey made it only halfway around, counting bedrooms on the upper level:

It might’ve fit a family of five in comfortably, had things been different.

Something absent she couldn’t immediately place worried at her as she stared at the remains of Obi-Wan's home — something she felt she ought to immediately recognize, but wouldn’t until later:

The ambivalent sounds of insects she’d heard from the fields around town had utterly turned to silence.

A bark drew her attention.

From where she stood at the side of the house, considering the odd placement of a rusting aluminum chair off the porch, still facing the field, she couldn’t see the Falcon.

Chewie began barking in earnest. She didn’t want to leave him to roam, not knowing how far the crop stretched or what dangers lurked in a house left unattended like this, even for the few short days that it had stood vacant.

“Chewie!” she reprimanded, finding him still in the truck bed, but straining against her command to stay put. “Hush, now!”

Yet, he continued — standing now to face the corn field, the ringing of each percussive bark growing increasingly more piercing.

She doubled back, slapping the side of the Falcon to get his attention. He stood on all fours, barely contained as he paced up and down the flatbed.

“Quiet, Chewie!” She snapped for him. “Here. To me!”

The sound died with a whine as he tossed a final, reproachful look to the field, and padded over. He licked her wrist to show good will — a doggy apology for causing such a fuss. Rey searched through the collection of artifacts that clustered the back seat, retrieving his lead and hooking his collar to it.

“Come on, you big oaf. You’re staying with me,” she said as she freed him from the truck. It only took a tug to bring him to her side, and bumping her sideways, they approached the house together.

The porch groaned as she crossed to the threshold, making its complaints with every sunken step. A straw mat sat askew before the screen door, whose springy complaints sagged and bulged where the wires had pulled from the frame. Fitting the key into the rusted lock, all Rey found she needed to do was push a little too hard for it to swing open onto darkness.

Odd shapes resolved themselves in the gloom — packed together and towering, it took a moment of blinking into the musty shadows to understand what crowded the entrance:

Stacks of boxes, books, and magazines hugged the walls of a long hallway that led to the kitchen at the back of the farmhouse. The stairs ascending to the second floor were littered with debris — crates, cans, shredded blankets, a broken fishing rod, and stacks of food stuffs; everything from boxes of saltines to tins of beans, some half-eaten and forgotten, browned and rusted with age.

Chewie’s plaintive whine was enough to echo the first pings of a breaking heart. She’d lifted a hand to her mouth and nose on instinct, her eyes watering at the sight — though at first, it might’ve been for the smell, Rey couldn’t completely be sure that was the whole reason. Her heart squeezed, and she swallowed her despair that someone — anyone — could live like this.

Chewie whined again, urging her forward, but Rey held on — both to herself as she breathed through the cotton of her teeshirt, held up to her mouth and nose like a mask, and tried to reassure him that, “It’s okay, boy.”

In reality, it was anything but: she’d understood Obi-Wan had been a recluse, and that he’d neglected both himself and his home for several years in isolation, but nothing could’ve prepared her for what lay beyond the entryway: the filth and the darkness; scattered bits of a life descended into despair and eventually madness. She drew Chewie back outside to the porch, concern for his tender paws and bottomless stomach a staunch motivator to tie him up to the Falcon’s front wheel. She’d have tried the porch, but honestly, she couldn’t expect such rotted wood would withstand a swift tug from a dog half as big. She patted him, instructed him to lie down, and braced herself for the worst as she crossed the threshold once more, letting the house and its decay surround her in its unwelcoming embrace.

“Okay,” she said to herself, her voice clotting on the air as she looked left into a disused parlour, and then right into what appeared to be a dining room — the table piled high to the cobweb-strewn chandelier with shoeboxes of gods-knew-what.

Something scuttled along the floorboard, and stepping gingerly, she searched for a light switch to illuminate the only bare bulb in the hallway. Wan light filtered into the back of the house, and with some dismay, she picked her way down a hall hung with peeling, water-stained wallpaper and the remnant stains where a few old photographs might’ve hung, once. She found a door beneath the staircase leading to a crawl space for storage, but it was so jammed that she couldn’t fathom making the attempt without bracing herself — perhaps with a shot of something stiff and smokey to steel her resolve, first. She took each step on her toes, not wanting to disturb the things at rest, drawing shallow breaths as if it pained her to breathe at all.

Cramped. Claustrophobic. She swallowed, closing her eyes just for a moment as she entered the kitchen where light like soured milk spilled in from the dirty windows to the back porch. It wasn’t as bad back here, but the sweet stench of rot pooled in the corners, making her eyes tear. The smell was stronger back here, and with sinking hope, she searched the patchy linoleum as a numbing, creeping sadness assaulted her with the thought: had Obi-Wan died here?

There was nothing to suggest something so macabre, but the thought lingered — following her with the persistence of a shadow.

She listened, anticipating something more than the silence that returned to her. Even Chewie remained quiet.

Rey winced, finding the mustard-yellow Frigidaire in the corner the culprit. It was off, for one — no telltale hum of electric to suggest it was functioning at all, and even closed, the smell lingered over it like a pall.

Clearly, no one had cleared the fridge — the aroma of spoil collecting like a wall that wanted to stop her.

Rey made a small, weak noise, covering her nose. With watering eyes, she leaned closer, examining the bizarre black and white offering she found in repeating patterns sellotaped across the fridge door — and the wall beside:

Jane and John Doe, Abafar, 2008. Jane and John Doe, Saleucami, 2010. Jane and John Doe, Mos Eisley, 2009. Jane and John Doe, Genosis, 2013. More. Dozens more — a map of obituaries, crossing deserts: an anonymous search for two people who’d abandoned their names like they’d abandoned their daughter.

Her knees threatened to buckle, her fingers hovering over Obi-Wan's search: it was not the answer she wanted, but it meant he’d been trying to find them too.

In every newspaper clipping, there was only ever the two of them: an anonymous man and woman. No children. Never three people.

Rey’s eyes burned, wondering what had led him to believe that they were dead; wondering how long he’d known that they had left her behind?

She scanned the others, curiosity driving her deeper —

Jedha. Atollon. Tattooine.

But not Jakku. Not where they’d left her.

She wiped her mouth, a buzzing in her ears and a tingling in her limbs.

“It’s not true,” she heard herself whisper.

The house and in its crowded stillness grew oppressive, bowing inwards towards her, stifling her breath with the overly sweet smell of decay. It grew cloying the longer she lingered by the fridge where the scent was the strongest. She wasn’t sure if the hum of flies was from the Frigidaire, or in her head.

Obi-Wan had been trying to track them down, but not her — had he known where she was this entire time, she wondered? Had he left her out there, abandoned in the desert while seeking out proof that her parents had passed on? Her grandfather: her only family — he hadn’t wanted her either.

“It’s not true.” Her voice cracked, the buzzing in her ears leaving spots across her vision. She needed to breathe. Needed to ground herself before she hyperventilated.

This wasn’t proof of their passing — this effort made by a madman was only a wild hunt that crossed cities and states and counties, but it wasn’t evidence of anything more than the dissolution of Obi-Wan's grip on reality. She swallowed hard, gripping the handle of the fridge to steady herself, the buzzing growing louder in her head. Obsession and compulsion were fine bedfellows indeed, and his house was proof of that. She wasn’t a stranger to either, but the thought that this was the collected efforts of a lifetime spent nurturing a psychotic break was no comfort to her.

She stared around the filthy kitchen, trying to make sense of her surroundings, realizing at once that this is what Obi-Wan's life had come to: loneliness and despair.

The smell of death sat heaviest on her as she gripped the door handle — choking all reason, permeating every inch of the ground floor with its reek. Determined as she was, there were worse truths to face during her search — and this was only the beginning.

She had to be strong, she told herself. She needed to believe that she could do this, especially when the doubts she had might only be the worst of it.

She choked back a sob, finding some new resilience within herself that thrummed under her skin.

She could do this.

She _would_ do this.

She would find them. She believed it to be true — they were _out_ there. They _would_ come back.

Unable to withstand the drone of flies any longer, she flung her arm over her face as she ripped open the refrigerator door with a snarl, ready to lighten whatever darkness lingered in a dead man’s house.

Nothing prepared her for the stench that unfurled from the small, dark space. The light had long burnt out, the power cut off to allow for the cut of meat occupying the top third of the space to spoil. Sweet, rotting darkness greeted her, and it had teeth.

She understood the parts of the whole, not understanding at first what it was that Obi-Wan had left behind:

The bone-yellow cleft of a jaw, blackened flesh, browned incisors bared in a rictus grin.

Enormous — it occupied the entirety of the top shelf set three rungs lower: at least the length of two of her hands spread from pinkie to thumb.

Rey staggered backward, trying to compile the pieces together in a mottle of reds and browns grown over with mold. Small larvae eating what was left. A cataracted eye stared back at her from a single, orbital socket: the jelly sloughing away with skin that might’ve once been doe-brown and speckled before the maggots took it over for their meal.

Her hip hit the table, and she spun with surprise. Bile burned up her throat as she threw herself at the back door, her fingers slipping over the latch and lock as the door of the fridge sagged opened wider, banging into the wall and exposing the carcass completely to the room. The smell that encroached on her raised the hair on the back of her neck. Her stomach turned, saliva filling her mouth, and she lunged out the door — old hinges barely holding as it slammed into the siding. She tumbled onto the lawn, tripping over her feet and into the dry grass where the staggered, the world spinning and too hot for October.

Doubled over, the world tilting on its axis and threatening to pitch her off, Rey heaved her lunch onto the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you not following me on [Tumblr](http://octobertown.tumblr.com) but are awaiting an update to _For Darkness, Stars_, I've got something planned for end of week. Schedule permitting, Ch. 34 ought to be available in a couple of days. Stay tuned. 
> 
> <3 october


	6. Black Knight

A cold sweat stuck her shirt to her skin. It was the first thing she noticed as the corn field came into focus before her, the distant sound of Chewie’s frantic barking carrying to her as if from down a long tunnel. Rey turned, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand as she gagged again, wrestling with the urge to dry heave. She spat. Stood slowly before all that waving corn.

Its movements had the languid cadence of having witnessed worse things, many seasons over.

The line that divided the field from the property boundary had been kept neat, the furrow walks perfectly tilled in rows that became gnarls in the overgrowth. No one had harvested it, and so it had grown wild and tall, then dried to desiccated ruin.

Its slow movements entranced her, allowing her to forget for a moment the horror in the house behind.

Rey flinched, turning to look over her shoulder as if she’d catch a glimpse of the animal’s carcass and its ever-staring eye. She hugged her arms to herself, reasoning that for all she knew, the rest of the creature had been put to use as a meal, or skinned, or sold after it was hunted — and that Obi-Wan hadn’t disposed of the head for the same reason that not everyone committed to suicide concerned themselves with emptying the fridge. She shivered, wiping cold sweat from her brow, and feeling horrible for the callous thought.

Yet, she found she didn’t want to go back inside. Not yet. Not while she imagined she could still smell it from all the way out here and the muscles of her stomach ached.

The corn waved, and Rey turned back to the field and its endless reach:

The breeze chilled the sweat on her skin, leaving her feeling the fever chill and sour shame for herself on her tongue. It occurred to her that this is where Obi-Wan must have made his last stand — wending his way through the corn to someplace where he was surrounded by so much gold: all soil and bright, a place where maybe only the whispers of his thoughts followed him.

Quiet.

A cloud rolled low over the field, the shadow it cast trailing fingers through the stalks as if running through a head of hair.

When the crop bowed to the breeze, something shifted in the hollows — there one moment, and then gone. Rey started, turning back to the spot and waiting. She frowned, uncertain; her eyes playing tricks.

Chewie’s frantic barking resumed at a fury, jerking her from her forward creep. She stood at the edge of the field, unaware that she’d taken a step closer, toes touching the boundary as if it were a threshold she wasn’t welcomed beyond. Something stayed her from taking that last step into the corn; a bit of self-preservation that recalled instincts wrought from pre-history, when the threat of the unknown kept her early ancestors close to the firelight.

Though as she turned, backtracking a few steps and then breaking into a jog, she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise with the uncanny feeling of being watched. Her feet stammered, and Rey glanced over a shoulder and back to the corn, wondering if her eyes were playing tricks — all those golden boughs swaying in collusion with one another, a kaleidoscope revealing shadows and secrets that waited beyond.

She stumbled, the world upending and righting itself as quickly, and breathing hard, when she looked back, there was nothing but those endless fields. Her heart hammered, her brain trying to process what her eyes had seen — though truly, there wasn’t a name or a form that would hold its likeness.

Heart pounding, she stopped, and waited as if staring a little longer into all that grain would reveal something that shouldn’t have been there.

A trick of the eye, perhaps, though the urge to investigate tugged at her like an urge that wouldn’t be readily squashed.

Placing a hand on the house’s siding, she chewed the inside of her mouth, seeing for the first time the few, broken stalks that led from the westernmost side of the property:

They’d blown over, their rigid lines bent and broken as if someone had crashed through them recently — a man-sized door into the field amidst all that ordered chaos.

She heard a car door slam, and with a frown, she turned, breaking into a jog. She could return later, she reasoned. It was her corn field now. Her crop. Her problem. Rey shook her head, the last lingering bits of fuzzy nausea clinging to her like lint, softening her senses of the world around her.

Instead of passing through the house again to get to her dog, she took the route around the side — avoiding its dank maze and all of its trappings, hugging the porch as if the tall grass would reveal a rabbit hole or some snag that would catch her ankle.

“Chewie!” she called, but he’d fallen silent.

Emerging around the gallery, her stomach still roiling despite its emptiness, she found a second truck in the drive: imposing and dusty black, it sat like a shadow behind the Falcon, ready to devour the Silverado.

Behind the wheel where she’d tied him, she saw only Chewie’s back legs in the dirt.

Ice spread through her chest, cold terror numbing her from the waist down as she broke into a sprint.

“Chewie!” she shouted, fright turning his name shrill.

Rey ran all of five steps before he rolled over — the immediate terror inspired by the thought he’d been hurt replaced by cold anger, and the prickling certainty that despite being so isolated out here in Junari Point, she was easily found by those she wanted to track her down the least.

She slowed to a halt, taking in her companion on the ground, and the man rubbing his wobbling belly.

“Good boy,” said Ben, scrubbing the soft folds beneath Chewie’s chin and unmindful of his slobbering, tongue-lolling happiness.

He squinted up at her from beneath the brim of his hat, pushing it back with a finger to look her over. Concern tightened his features for a moment, but he smoothed his expression. She saw it, however, and it did nothing but stoke her hostility towards this interloper. This… stalker.

She balled her fists.

More an accusation than a question, she spat, “What are you doing here.”

Clearly, he saw something in her expression that told him everything he needed to know about how she’d found the place. Her hands trembled, still. She shoved them in her pockets, and met his long stare with her own in a standoff of wills. Determined not to break first, something shifted in his expression as he assessed her. It must have seemed like she’d seen a ghost in that old house.

It was like he’d pulled off a mask, and what Rey found there drew her back a bit; left her hesitating.

He was younger than she’d guessed initially — no more than a handful of years older than her, now that he knelt before her; now that the concern he wore painted him less imposing.

“House got you spooked.” He nodded at the building. “Haven’t been here an hour yet. I think that’s a record.”

With a surreptitious swipe of her mouth, and wishing she had a mint, she re-shoved her hands in her pockets before he could comment on her white-knuckled hold on her control, and shrugged with a little too much force. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

She narrowed her gaze at Chewie, who sat up halfway but kept his eyes half-closed in pleasure.

Ben stood, and like a good little lemming, Chewie followed, his tail wagging.

“You dropped your rope out in front of the hardware store,” he said, tilting his head at his truck. “Figured you might need it, so I brought it over.”

He eyed her, dropping his gaze to the dirt, and fixing his stare somewhere around her navel. He opened his mouth as if wanting to say more, then shut it, and then glanced up again. Pain pinched the corners of his eyes, but he glanced away before she could see how young the expression made him seem: it stripped away some of the hardness about him. It was as if she felt the pinch of his embarrassment.

“Didn’t like meeting you like that, either,” he managed.

She raised both eyebrows.

He laughed into his chest. “What I mean to say is that I often make an impression, but it’s not always good.” He held out his hand — a peace offering. “I’d like to start again. My name is Ben Solo, I’ve lived in Junari Point my entire life, and I think your dog’s opinion of me is a shade better than yours.”

She folded her arms across her chest, eyeing his long fingers with wary scrutiny.

He waited a beat longer, and finally arriving at the conclusion that he’d pissed her off sufficiently enough that she wouldn’t be so swayed, let resignation set him back a step.

“If you don’t mind my saying —” He glanced at the house. “You look a little green around the gills.”

One damning look at the house was all it took for Ben to take the gist of it.

It must have showed in her expression: the disheartening knowledge that her quick “in and out” was going to take a lot more effort than she thought.

“It’s bad,” he surmised, eyes darkening with something unfathomable. His throat worked as he looked at the porch — the screen door, and considered what lay beyond.

“It’s fine —” she began, trying to beg off his help before he could offer it. She’d handled worse. She’d lived in bad conditions before. No stranger to hardship, the way she’d found the place shouldn’t have set her off the way it did, she reasoned.

She didn’t need Ben or anyone else dealing with Obi-Wan's leftovers.

He took a step forwards, bending down to peer into her face in a way that was too critical and too invasive for a stranger, and her breath caught. She covered her mouth, leaning away.

“I —” She couldn’t tell him that what she’d found in the fridge had made her sick. She didn’t want him to see the assortment of obituaries papered over Obi-Wan's walls. There was a possessive part of her that, although she hadn’t known the man, felt that his insanity should somehow be kept private.

“You were ill,” he said. “I’ve seen that look plenty on the boys down at the bar in Hanna who couldn’t hold their liquor. This is something else.” 

He stopped himself from reaching for her elbow, but he searched her expression for confirmation. It felt like he was probing her soul with those dark eyes of his.

“Something in the house,” he concluded. Ben straightened, the intensity of his scrutiny turning to a slow-smouldering resignation as he took a step towards the porch.

“Don’t —“ she began. “You don’t have to —” she tried, but it lacked the conviction of someone who truly didn’t want anyone’s help.

Mouth pinched into a thin line, he said with an evenness that bordered on zealousness, “With all do respect, ma’am — taking assistance as its offered isn’t such a bad thing when you’re dealing with someone else’s old dark stuff.” He nodded, he jaw tight. “Old Kenobi was a good man. A kind man. Deserved better than he got. But even good folk have minds that don’t always stay that way.”

There were moments in her childhood where she’d imagined what it might be like to have someone tie her boots for her, or push her hair from her eyes, and to bandage her scrapes. She’d learned over time that the only person to rely on was herself, truly, to mend the holes in her clothing, or patch the roof of the garage when it rained. Years of forgetting worked towards dimming that particular daydream, and it had faded enough that she barely remembered the warmth it inspired.

Perhaps it was a moment of weakness, or perhaps it was the pinprick glow in her chest that seemed to appear like a sun’s ray amidst clouds — but whatever it was, her throat closed around it, shutting it in before it might grow into something unmanageable as Ben Solo stared at her with that particular intensity of his.

In a small voice, Rey managed, “It’s in the fridge.”

He regarded her for a beat further before Ben nodding to Chewie and giving him an affectionate pat. “You did good to keep him tied up. Best to do the same at night, and indoors if possible.” He squinted toward the fields. “Easy to get lost out here, especially after nightfall. You don’t want to go stumbling through sixty acres of overgrowth looking for him.”

Chewie butted Ben’s knee, tail wagging. Ben appeared as if he wanted to say something more, opening his mouth, and then grinding his jaw shut with a nod and another frown as he turned to the house.

“Hanna City officials should have sent someone out here with you,” he said under his breath.

He needn’t have told her to wait for him, she didn’t want to see it again for herself so soon: not the condition of the place, and not the contents of the refrigerator. Instead, Rey tugged Chewie’s lead back to her as she followed the roll of Ben’s shoulders, her gaze sliding down his back to his hips. She looked away, forcing a smile for the dog instead of lingering on the shape of him, approaching the house like some black knight going to battle for her honour.

“Come on,” she tugged Chewie along, trailing to the porch as Ben vanished inside. The screen door’s rusted complaint lingered after he’d gone, and, with some wariness, she stopped and sat on the porch to wait. Wrestling with the tension that sat in her belly was less a challenge than negotiating the squirming knot of shame in her chest, and from where she lingered, she could see him pause, taking in the stacks of stuff in the hallway without comment.

Ben’s footsteps echoed, brushing things aside with his boots, stopping only to try a light switch. She listened, but he said nothing at all as he ventured deeper into the house.

When he disappeared into the kitchen, she held her breath, expecting more than the silence that returned to her.

The shuffle and scrape of a chair was the only noise, and then the groan of opening cupboards followed by the crinkle of plastic. Chewie opened his mouth to pant, his wobbly chin brushing her thigh as he flopped down beside her, using her leg for a cushion for his heavy head. She scrubbed his ears absently.

Ben returned through the house with a large garbage bag, passing her wordlessly and going to his truck. Something unspooled within her, watching him work in silence and with the precision of a mortuary technician. Somber. Pensive. He lifted eyes to her, squinting as he turned away to regard the field once more.

“The electric went out,” he said at length. “It was just a deer’s head.”

She chewed the inside of her mouth, hand buried in Chewie’s fur, feeling his warmth — the way he panted, the rise and fall of his chest. She nodded, but sidestepped the question she wanted to ask that she knew Ben had no answer to:

What on earth was Obi-Wan doing keeping a deer’s head in the fridge?

Ben nodded at the house, his entire demeanour turned grim and quiet. “I made sure the fusebox was up and running. Had to flip a switch is all. It happens out here — power goes down with the slightest breeze.”

She nodded, ducking her head and trying to dampen down her embarrassment.

“It’s in the kitchen, just to the left of the pantry.”

“Thanks,” she managed, feeling all the more like an idiot for all of it: that she couldn’t manage it herself, that it had made her sick, and that he was still standing there trying not to look at her like she was just a city girl without a clue.

“It surprised me is all,” she croaked, forcing a smile. “In Jakku, the buzzards pick the bones clean. You don’t often see — that.” She swallowed.

He schooled his expression into careful neutrality that didn’t quite hide his concern, nor his interest.

Frowning at the house again, Ben peered into the hall past the screen door, and considered what awaited her there.

“It’s bad,” she agreed with his unsaid assessment.

Though he didn’t argue, the look he fixed her with made her heart stammer in its intensity. She heard herself sucking in a breath as he took a step closer, considering.

He said as gently as he could, “I meant no disrespect when I said it before: you’re not from these parts. I wouldn’t expect city folk to be accustomed to country ways, nor country dark.” He gave a pointed glance to the fields surrounding them. “It’s isolated out here, and there aren’t any lights for miles.” He shook his head, watching her for a reaction. “This house —” He licked his lips. “This is going to be hard. It would be for anyone, no matter how close you were.” He shook his head, opened his mouth to say more, then thought better of it.

“We weren’t. I wasn’t,” she confessed. “I didn’t even know I had a grandfather until Mayor Organa called me,” she offered. She searched his gaze for some understanding. “I don’t know anything about where I come from.” The lump in her throat doubled. “I _need_ to know.”

Even that admission was a challenge. She stopped herself from saying more, her ears ringing with the tension of it: how much it hurt to want something so bad, and never know it was out there slowly going mad. The only way she was going to find out anything about herself was by braving what she found inside.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. It was clear he found the idea of her staying in the house abhorrent, but it wasn’t his place argue with her. Strange, to have a complete stranger express concern for her well-being without saying anything at all. Ben waited a beat, hazarding a step closer to place his hand against the porch rail. He appeared to be weighing what he said next.

“There’s a motel out in Hanna City,” he said. “About an hour’s drive away.”

Mouth pinching into a sharp line, Rey shook her head. “I’m staying here.”

He searched her expression, his voice pitched low in warning.

“We endure things differently, out here.” He stopped himself, inhaling sharply. “I could teach you what I know — about this house, this land. If you wanted to stay out here —”

“It’s not permanent.”

She wasn’t making that kind of commitment. Yes, this would be a job. Yes, this would be painful and difficult. Yes, she was up to it.

Remorse pinched his expression just for a moment, but it was fleeting.

“A place like this does things to a person. It can mess with your head.” He lowered his voice, as if he thought the house might overhear and take offence. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

She sniffed, giving him a rueful smile. “I’m not.” She patted Chewie’s flank. He smacked his chops, his had bobbing on her leg. “I’ve got an excellent guard dog.”

He raised an eyebrow.

Rey gave him a wry look. “He might’ve taken a shine to you, but that’s highly unusual for him. You ought to have seen what he nearly did to the poor Chief of Police in Hanna City — near took his arm off for looking at me the wrong way.”

Ben smirked.

The expression changed his face entirely — the wicked twist of his mouth snagged her attention. It was a strangely nice shape; wide and soft-looking, balancing his other features in a way that made sense.

“Dameron probably deserved it.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but something about the flicker of amusement in his gaze stopped her.

Standing, she shoved her hands into her back pockets, and glanced behind her. Ben straightened, mimicking her posture, stepping back so that they pivoted together.

He squinted to the barn in the distance.

“I haven’t checked it out yet,” she admitted.

His frown deepened. “Might as well avoid it as long as you can. Whole thing might come down on your head if you’re not carrying a bit of luck,” he said. “Thing’s been around a century, and full of rusted equipment. A waste.”

Chewie looked up, but it was Ben who gestured for him to stay. Like it was the most natural thing. Worse, Chewie put his head back down.

They meandered a few steps towards his truck, Rey chewing over how much she could tell him without divulging every bit of her affairs. She couldn’t explain it, but there was a familiarity to this man who’d insulted and threatened her, and was now showing her that he wasn’t the impossible asshole she’d taken him for initially.

“I can’t be afraid,” she said. It was as simple as that: she did not have a choice in the matter. “Fear is not an option for me.” She shrugged, smiling without humour as if to soften it for him. Not entirely understanding herself why she wanted him to know this about her, she continued, “It’s just a house.”

He laughed in surprise — shocking her, and rousing Chewie completely. “It’s hardly the house that ought to scare you off.”

Rey frowned, turning back to the opened door while processing that: he’d seen the inside, hadn’t he? He’d seen what Obi-Wan kept in the fridge.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she pressed.

Ben pinched his lips together, checking himself. Shook his head and scoffed a little. “You need a teacher.”

Folding her arms across her chest, she looked him over from head to toe. Raised her eyebrows as if in challenge.

A smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth, and he let out a breath of a laugh. “I only meant that I’ve lived here my entire life.”

He pulled off his cap, swiping his hair back under it: thick and wavy — a brown so rich it was almost black — Ben shook it away from ears that were proportioned to his nose and mouth, but still seemed large for his head. It made for an incongruous painting: he carried himself like a harbinger, and yet, the pieces of him cobbled together into a young man who’d grown too quickly for his body. There was an awkward honesty to him beneath all that shadowy menace.

Rey stalled for a moment, shoving aside the momentary disbelief at herself that she’d discovered that there was a particular handsomeness to him and now that she realized it, she didn’t quite know what to do with it.

She cocked her head to the side, curiosity roiling around, turning into an itch. “You spent time here?” She asked, nodding to the house.

His jaw ticked. “As a child,” he admitted.

When Obi-Wan was still a functioning part of society, no doubt.

Rey raised an eyebrow. “You spend time with Obi-Wan at all? Lately?”

He took a breath. “_No_, but --“

She shrugged. “Well?”

He stared, seeming to arrive at new sort of resignation that settled into exasperated disbelief.

“Suit yourself, Rey from Nevada.”

“Jakku,” she heard herself correcting.

Ben blinked, frowning.

“I’m from Jakku.”

He nodded too slowly, understanding her a little better perhaps. A glance at her hand-me-down car and the holes in her jeans, scuffed sneakers, and too-loose teeshirt, and it appeared as if Ben Solo were beginning to put together the pieces a bit better.

“Does that change your opinion of me?” she asked.

He half-frowned, half-smiled. Shaking his head, he turned to his car, extracting the length of rope she’d dropped back in town. He wrapped it, using his elbow to measure each length.

“I don’t judge, Rey of Jakku,” he told her. “Not unless I’ve got to.”

Ben handed her the rope, and as she reached for it, he didn’t let go immediately. “If you change your mind; if you want to escape this place for a time —” He jutted his chin east. “I live in Sarini Hollow, just past Silver Creek. Cross the tree line and take a left past the bridge.” He searched her face. “You can find me there if you need to.”

She doubted she would, but she didn’t tell him as much. Still, it was a nice of him —

Letting go of the rope, he nodded, pulling the brim of his hat low as he got into his car.

True, there was an intensity to Ben Solo that left her unsettled, but a part of her found it less disconcerting that he’d taken the trouble to make amends. It was a kindness that most people wouldn’t offer, and she sensed that his concern was genuine. More, there was a subtle surreality to the encounter: she couldn’t put her finger on what it was, but the sense impression left behind as he turned the engine on, backing up to turn around, he his arm draped from the window to offer her a parting wave — left her filled with a sense of quiet.

She breathed, lingering as he drove off, back the way he came down the long stretch of road to the highway beyond. Rey remained, watching the fading taillights, wondering at the curious sense of deja-vu once more, and not knowing why it was, the last thought was that it reminded her distantly of what she thought home might feel like.


	7. Kenobi Blood

Hazy from restless dreams that clung to her where she slumped with elbows skidding on the melamine countertop at Junari Point’s Cantina, she grimaced over her coffee, taking a sip like it was medicine. It had a rich heaviness to it that slipped down her throat like dark chocolate, and resembled the color of the night she’d found outside the Kenobi house after the sun set.

She’d picked her way through the second floor before darkness fell, confused by an overly-long corridor that ran the stretch of the stairwell at the landing, lending a particular sort of gloom to the upper level where no light came through from the easternmost side of the building.

She found the drop-door to the attic in what appeared to be Obiwan’s old room, but the space was even more spartan than the rest: a bed, a lamp, and a crate were the only furniture; the sheets stripped from a stained mattress. He might’ve lived like a monk on the upper level, or perhaps she’d find his effects at the police station in Hanna City in an evidence locker. Rey had left the room as it was, floorboards echoing her exit.

Grateful that Ben had thought to reset the electric, she’d set the place aglow with as many bulbs as were working — lighting the entire place up like a bloody Christmas tree. She’d taken her pick of the other three bedrooms upstairs, finding that the destruction and hoarding potential to be less awful than the lower level of the house. With a little shuffling of a few boxes, she’d claimed a rather plain-looking room with a yellowed, lace-covered queen, whose only offending trait were the few rust spots on the frame. The bed had been boxed in by a chest of drawers and an old fainting couch, but the mattress was comfortable if creaky, and with any luck, the lack of water stains on the ceiling meant the roof wouldn’t leak on her in her sleep if it rained.

The challenge, of course, had been in the sleeping part — because even with Chewie snuffling on a spare blanket thrown on the floor at her feet, she’d remained wakeful and restless in a stranger’s bed. It smelled like dust and stale linen, and the absolute silence of the world beyond the windows left her wishing for the sounds of traffic; city life. Any life.

A paned window looked out on the corn field.

Only suffocating silence returned to her, which made each creak and groan of the house’s settling seem oppressive. Chewie’s occasional growling into the nothing beyond the window didn’t help, and catching her own reflection when she ventured to check had nearly given her a coronary.

Ben’s words of caution lingered, becoming portents that she replayed for several hours as she struggled to keep her eyes closed to the dark when unfamiliar shapes became sinister nighttime companions.

Dreams came with difficulty, and when they arrived, the did so with the pervasive insistence of wanting to become nightmares; edged with uncanny shadows between the endless fields, the whispers of the crop like restless spirits whose voices were too soft to become word or warning.

She walked those furrows in an endless path that took her deeper into a glowing world of gold and grey, the snapped spines of corn husks beneath bare feet that cut and sheared, and left her blood on the soil to sting. In the worst of them, a smudge of black followed in the distance — far away enough that she could not discern its features, though its steady pursuit assured her that it would eventually catch her up.

Awaking to the grey morning and weak sunlight filtering through grime-coated windows did nothing to salvage her hopeful ambitions for the day, and upon deciding that she’d feign sleep no longer, she resumed her search: cataloguing and casting aside what items remained that didn’t serve to paint a fuller picture of the life abandoned. She found nothing of use in her search for her family history — no clues to her parents’ whereabouts nor her own existence — only possessions that made it seem as if Obiwan had been preparing for the apocalypse. Stacks of them in disheartening piles.

For his part, Chewie remained restless. Occupying a seat in front of the back door, he gave the corn field the bulk of his attention with only the occasional whine letting Rey know he was even awake.

By eight o’clock, the kitchen aired out and her stomach threatening to consume itself, she and Chewie got into the car, and returned to town to find food. The general store had yet to open, but she re-found the diner with little difficulty.

It was empty, save for a diminutive woman hidden mostly by the counter. She used a stool to stand on, and pushed her thick-glasses up her nose to inspect Rey as the bell rang over her head.

She tried not to stare at the thin wisps of hair covering a mostly bald pate, or the sallow citrus color of her skin amidst the wrinkles that puckered her mouth when she offered Rey a thin-lipped smile.

“Cancer’s in remission,” she informed Rey as she doddled around the idea of claiming a stool. “And it’s not catching.”

She poured the sludge into a coffee cup, and left it like an offering for Rey to take or not.

A moment later, the woman had disappeared again, only to slap a menu onto the peeling laminate.

“I’ll give you a minute to adjust to the idea, since you’ve missed the breakfast rush.” A pause. “Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “The boys who work the land are up at five. This is practically mid-day for most.”

It took Rey a moment to realize that a domed mirror sat behind the cash, and the woman, while facing away from her and to the kitchen, could watch every move she made. Clever. Rey smothered a smirk.

“I take all precautions. Have to, when you’ve got my stature — need to show the farm hands who’s boss from time to time, and it doesn’t help any for them to go picking me up and popping me onto a shelf where I can’t get down from.” She tapped her glasses. “Gotta have eyes in the back of my head for some of those scoundrels.” She eyed her. “You can call me Maz.”

Rey claimed a stool, checking the door to make sure Chewie wouldn’t go wandering off.

Maz hoisted herself onto a milk crate behind the cash, peering over to the dog tied to a mailbox outside.

“I expect he’s hungry too,” she said drily. “Both of you look half-starved and part-wrung.”

Rey lifted a shoulder in a shrug.

Maz tutted.

There wasn’t anything salvageable in Obiwan’s fridge, and she’d taken pains to empty out the few items that had sat with the spoiled carcass for too long. Anything non-perishable in the house remained questionable, given the state that she’d found things in, and while Chewie might be fine with dog food, really — he’d eat anything.

It had been a long night, besides.

“How much meat do you think a dog that size would need to get through to feel full?” Maz mused aloud.

Rey glanced at her askance. “How many hamburgers do you have?”

The wrinkled on Maz’s forehead where her eyebrows ought to have been rose to crumple her forehead.

“Oh, but he is a handsome one, isn’t he?” Maz cooed. “I’ll see what I can dig up. You hungry, girl? I expect so.”

In response, Rey’s stomach rumbled. Tiredness dragged her mouth to the cup without lifting it from its saucer, and Maz took it as a cue to leave her the pot. Rey liked her immediately.

“I’ll fix you the special. Can’t imagine the old Kenobi place has a stocked pantry worth picking at these days.”

Rey shut her eyes, trying to shake off the uncanny way in which everyone seemed to know who she was, and where she was staying.

“Can I ask you a question?” she hedged.

“Can you talk while I cook?” Maz asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I let the kitchen staff go after the breakfast rush. Won’t pick up again until last light or so, ‘round six. This week it promises to be particularly dead, what with Harvest Home and all. Everyone’ll be closed up by two.”

The clatter of pans followed Maz as she ducked behind swinging doors that led to the kitchen. Rey stared bleary-eyed and drifting at her surroundings, not really taking it in. She’d snagged on a thought that hadn’t wanted to let go, and nurturing it left her feeling heavy.

Sidetracked, Rey dragged her eyes from a collection of framed news clippings lining the walls about the Cantina, documenting several decades worth of service to the Junari Point community. In most of the photos, regardless of their age, Maz appeared exactly as she did at the moment that Rey had walked into the diner.

It sparked a thought, however, turning into a crackling beacon of hope as Rey sat a little straighter. Surely, someone who’d been part of the small community for so long would have known Obiwan personally, before his reclusive years.

“Did you know my grandfather?” Rey asked.

“I knew you’d ask me as much,” Maz said, the sound of bacon striking the griddle and sizzling like music. “Toast?”

“Please,” Rey said, sliding from her stool to investigate the collection. Some were yellowed and rippled with age around the edges. Others had taken water damage.

“I knew it was you, too,” Maz said, her large eyes appearing in the divider separating the kitchen from the diner. “Live as long as I have, and you see the same eyes in different people.”

A younger Mayor Organa was present in one photo, surrounded by people Rey didn’t recognize. Different deputies. Different officers. Different residents of the town. An awards ceremony with large, bright banners painted in greyscale. A grand opening. A grand re-opening after a flood. A fire. Maz’s place was hailed as a bastion of the community; lauded several times over. The exterior hadn’t changed — the sign was the same as it was in the 50’s.

It was a small, suspended bit of history Rey had before her, and despite her weariness, found a new energy as Maz returned with two slices of buttered toast and a small ceramic bowl of homemade strawberry jam.

“Rest of the food’s coming — eggs, bacon, beans. Alright?”

She nodded, turning at Maz’s sigh. Rey touched the corner of a frame with the tip of her finger, finding the date incongruous with the woman standing before her.

She smiled anyway, looking exactly as her mother had in 1977.

“Oh.”

Maz nodded. “Strong family resemblance. This was my mother’s diner, and my mother before her. Three generations of Kanata women have overseen this place.” She beamed. “We saw this town grow up, just as we’ve seen its decline.”

A little weight of sadness bloomed in her chest at that as Maz came around to stand by her side. She gave Chewie a wave through the glass door, smiling as she held up a plate of hamburger meat.

“He looks big enough to tear me in half,” said Maz appreciatively.

“You never know with him,” she agreed, accepting the plate Maz offered with a weak smile, her hopes to find clues in the diner dwindling as quickly as they’d risen.

The bell made a little tinkling sound as she pushed it open, drawing her attention upwards and snagging it.

Frowning, Rey placed the offering in front of Chewie, who began gobbling without preamble, his tail wagging.

She pointed at the small symbol inscribed over the door in silent question. “I’ve seen this mark before.”

Maz lifted a shoulder. Waved it off. “Old folk custom,” she said. “No sense changing out a perfectly useful piece of wood for a bit of ancient graffiti.”

Rey looked at it: three circles in varying sizes, speared through with three crosses.

“What it’s for?” she asked.

“Oh, pff,” said Maz. “Who knows. Protection, most likely.” She barely glanced at it.

“Against what?” Rey asked, but Maz had turned her attention Chewie, now devouring his breakfast.

“Good boy,” Maz chimed in, bending down with her hands on her knees. Chewie looked up a moment, licking his chops, and got back to business. “As for your grandfather --“ she said, squinting up at Rey. She straightened. “I knew him, alright. I was here when he moved to Junari Point from Mandalore. Not quite sure where he came from before that, but I heard that’s where he buried his wife. He didn’t like to talk about his life before much.” Her smile was strained. “Seems to be the case with most folk who settle in these parts. You come out here to leave the world behind.”

Heart pounding, Rey said weakly, “What?”

Maz assessed her. “Don’t go getting all excited, girl. You look about ready to pass out. You’re white as a sheet. Sit down before you bash your head on the counter top — I’d hate to have to clean up more blood in here today.”

Rey saw her feet moving, but the sensation didn’t reach her as she drifted back to the counter.

“Eat something,” Maz instructed, and swallowing another mouthful of life-affirming caffeine, she crammed a corner of the toast into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed until Maz reappeared with the rest of her steaming breakfast.

“But, my grandmother…?”

Maz shook her head. “He never spoke of her, nor his children — though I know for certain he must have had at least one because there _you_ are.” She chuckled. “Spitting image —“ She gestured to Rey’s face. “It’s in the eyes. The mouth too.”

Rey tried not to shrink, but the weight of disappointment sat heavy on her shoulders.

“You’re going to need your strength,” Maz said. “You’re obviously not here for the harvest festival; you’re here on a wild hunt. I see that.”

“I have to go back —” Rey began.

Maz nodded, squinting. Placing both small hands on the table, she leaned forward, inspecting Rey. Unsatisfied, Maz drew back, tugged her glasses off, cleaned them, and peered down her nose until she’d come to some conclusion. “Back to some nowhere town, as if Junari Point wasn’t nowhere enough.”

Rey shook her head. Something about this woman made it feel like her soul was left bared to the world. There were no secrets with Maz Kanata — not with the way it felt like she could read her like a book; notes scribbled in the margins, and all.

Opening her mouth to explain, Maz only scrutinized her.

“Have you ever considered that the belonging you seek isn’t behind you?”

It snagged, pulling the pieces of what she knew apart in a way that was almost painful.

Rey couldn’t manage to argue — the thought of abandoning her home in Jakku abhorrent in a way that made her want to gasp at the despair it inspired. But what if they returned for her? What if they came to find her, and she was gone? Panic prickled through her lungs, setting a numbness in her limbs that marched across her skin like an army of spiders. She shivered, the hollow feeling in her chest lingering.

“You’re still pale,” Maz observed, and went to fetch more bacon. “Eat.”

Chewie pawed at the door, trying to get Rey’s attention.

She gestured for him to settle down, looking at the food on her place, uncertain if she could eat another bite. Swallowing, Rey rallied: part of her didn’t want the woman to stop talking, and she suspected that the instant she abandoned her efforts, Maz would.

The thought was more terrifying than the prospect of never finding out what had kept them from her for so many years at all.

“He was an odd fella, Obiwan,” Maz continued, satisfied that Rey had stuffed her mouth. It kept her from interrupting, besides. She knocked a sip of coffee back to help her swallow, her throat working against her best efforts. “Kept to himself mostly, which wasn’t unusual — didn’t care to come into town much, as the people thought him strange in the head. Too much baggage, I think. Too much living will do that to a person; takes all their grief and regrets and buries them in it. Obiwan poured all that sadness into some sort of penitence, I like to think: working his land like the devil was on his heels. He did good, too. I hear that farm is worth millions today, even if he neglected it in his later years.”

Rey stopped chewing. Millions?

“But the people of Junari Point, well — they’re something of an acquired taste. You need to be willing to play by their rules some to live in this community, and I don’t rightly think that was the case with old Ben Kenobi.”

She looked up.

Maz rubbed the spot between her eyes, some old pains making her sit back heavily.

“I know you’re looking for something,” she told Rey. “I see that in your eyes too. It’s a hunger that nothing can quite sate. I seen it enough in the farm boys — the kids who grew up in these parts like their parents, and their parents’ parents before them; always looking far off to some distant horizon, as if that weak sun behind clouds has answers they can’t find for themselves in the dirt they grew from. Most folk don’t ever leave.”

In her peripheral vision, beyond the diner window to her left, something pulled at Rey’s attention — a smudge of shadow across the street, winnowed beyond the grime of the glass and turned wispy. Rey half expected that when she turned, that familiar sense of disorientation teasing her like a cool breeze, there’d be nothing there at all: a lock of hair fallen from behind her ear, or something just behind her playing tricks on her imagination.

She was wrong, of course, but that didn’t stop the tug on her solar plexus when she saw who lingered at the gas station across the street:

He moved with a sinewy grace that didn’t fit his stature; assured, slow steps and an inward-facing contemplation weighed him, making it appear that he was brooding over something particularly heavy. Ben Solo kept his gaze downturned as he worked, fitting the nozzle into his truck and lingering there as if lost in thought. The lines of his back and shoulders were tensed, as if he’d not let himself be caught disarmed. He reminded Rey of troubled dreams — night terrors spent on sheets sweated-through, and other things — other reasons for such nocturnal contemplations that lingered in shadowed bedroom corners when darkness fell and the sheets became dampened for other reasons.

Maz’s attention followed hers, and Rey, catching herself staring, turned away. It was too late, of course:

“You’re acquainted with the Solo boy,” Maz remarked, interested.

Rey shook her head. Debated how to answer that when she didn’t know him at all, but something felt altogether too familiar about him that denied her denial. She lied only a little: “Not in so many words.”

The woman’s smile lingered, shivering at the corners as if there was some secret there she wished her to know, but wouldn’t broach.

It was a moment more before Maz shrugged, leaving a breadcrumb for Rey to follow — if she dared:

“Probably best that you don’t. That family’s suffered a run of bad luck. Some might even say it’s a curse.”

Rey looked up to find Maz watching her with a shrewdness that tickled at her, leaving her heel jiggling on the stool and wanting to ask for more. She chewed her lip instead, glancing back at Chewie to find the dog sitting at attention, his tail wagging half-heartedly as if Ben would take notice of him. Rey could hear his whines through the glass.

“Solo grew up here, not too far from Obiwan’s farmstead.” She tipped her head, an enigmatic smile teasing at the corners of her mouth. “His ma had the land; father wasn’t so fortunate — was a drifter who came through town one summer, and took a shine to a girl he met out on the fields. He was a city boy, as I knew him — and a scoundrel.” She shook her head. “Terrible business, that.”

Rey didn’t bother stopping herself.

“What happened to his father?” she asked.

Maz raised her chin. “Ben said it was an accident, of course. He was only fifteen at the time. Angry young man — fell in with the wrong crowd. You know how they are at that age.”

She didn’t.

Rey looked back to Ben, now turned to her as if listening in from where he stood — all the way across the street, leaning against the back of his pickup.

The sear of heat in her cheeks didn’t stop her from staring right back, her skin prickling with it as their gaze met across that vast divide — the connection like a live-wire that left her limbs thrumming.

She shifted in her seat, the echo of Maz’s voice distant.

“It took six hours for them to pull Han Solo’s body from the combine —”

The sounds of Maz as she disappeared back into the kitchen dulled the longer Rey stared. Across the street, Ben remained; watchful and silent, as if waiting for something. He wore no smile, and he didn’t wave, but the weight of his gaze was as penetrating as a hard rain.

She swallowed around the muzzy, tight feeling in her throat. A droning hum filled her ears that turned to a sharp ringing.

“A combine --“ she repeated at a whisper, but Maz didn’t hear her.

The bell over the door sounded, but Rey barely registered it. It took another half-minute for her to focus on the woman’s gentle smile as she approached the counter: sadness crimping hazel eyes, smile lines carved into skin alongside others owing themselves to frowns.

“I thought I might find you here,” Mayor Organa said.

Rey swallowed the lump in her throat, her voice absent as she wrenched her attention from the man across the street as his companions caught up to him: the large blond, and the red head — one claiming the back seat of the truck, and the other, the front. She watched as Ben turned his head to the side, saying something she couldn’t discern, and glanced back one last time as he lifted himself from the truck’s side.

“Mayor Organa,” she said, her voice too high. She hitched a smile on, though it faltered.

Like Maz, the older woman followed her gaze. A shadow flit across her face — there and gone, allowing her smile to dim only a little.

“I passed by the house this morning to check on you,” she said quietly. “I’m glad you found the Cantina. This place is practically an institution.”

Maz peered over the divider from the kitchen. “Leia! The usual?” Her cheerful greeting belied the ball she’d dropped only minutes before.

“Not today, Maz. I’m just passing through.” She smiled. “Maz’s mother used to feed me the exact same dish whenever I’d come in here as a girl.”

“Sausage gravy and biscuits,” Maz chimed in.

“Sausage gravy and biscuits,” Leia agreed. “No matter the time of day.”

Across the street, the engine of Ben’s truck turned over. Rey could feel his stare as keenly as a caress down her cheek, leaving her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth and her attention swaying back to the window.

“Are you alright, dear?” Leia asked, knowing humour quirking the corners of her mouth. “You look a little flushed.”

Rey forced a smile, altogether too aware that he was lingering, the humming engine a warning sound. She knotted her hands in her lap, fighting the desire to march outside and plant herself beside his rolled-down window and demand what the hell he thought he was up to. It was a near-crazed impulse.

He’d been nice to her dog. The thought whirled. How could someone who was so kind to Chewie have murdered his own father?

Leia followed her stare as it now became clear that Rey had gathered the attention of all three parties in the truck: Hux leaned around Ben to see her, his narrow frame a wisp beside Ben. In the backseat, Phasma narrowed her eyes.

Rey licked her lips. “I ran into them yesterday,” she ventured. “They were asking questions about the farm.”

“Ah,” said Leia, standing. “Shall we say hello?”

“No!” Rey barked, nearly toppling from her seat in her haste. “No, I mean -- It’s fine. I’m fine.”

The Mayor gave her an unscrupulous once-over that confirmed she was anything but.

“The people of Junari Point have their ways — their customs and traditions, carried on through generations. It’s an insular community, with ideals born out of the need to protect themselves. They don’t like outsiders,” she offered. It didn’t sound apologetic in the slightest: it was just fact. “But you’re not an outsider, Rey.” She informed her, waving to Maz. “Put the girl’s meal on my tab, Maz, will you?” She called as she gestured for Rey to follow her outside.

Rey hesitated, unsure why her stomach was intent on doing flip-flops at the prospect.

Leia pushed the door open, standing straight and tall, and imperious as she gestured for Rey to go before her.

“You’re blood,” she said. “Inheritor of a legacy and a homestead that was raised up from the dirt. That gives you as much right as any of them to be here. You’ve got your claim to it because you’re a Kenobi.”

Rey crossed to the sidewalk, struggling not to squirm as Ben regarded the pair of them for a long moment. She saw Phasma lean forward in the back seat, saying something to Hux. In the next instant, Ben hit the gas, his elbow on the window, waving back to her with two fingers, his dark gaze a lingering shadow in the sideview mirror.

Rey shivered, trying to push aside the incongruous vision of a man with Ben’s features, naked and tangled in a piece of farm machinery, eyes staring skyward without seeing at a weak sun. Her exhalation came out a shudder, and she blinked back the sudden sting in her eyes.

“And Kenobi blood salts the earth of this town,” said Leia grimly.

\--

“I was hoping I could talk to you,” the Mayor said, her hands clasped behind her back. She waited, looking out of place in her two-piece power suit and low pumps, while the backdrop of Junari Point faded to a drone around them.

Rey couldn’t quite shake the humming in her ears — that bizarre tingle of apprehension that the mayor wouldn’t seek her out unless it was important, and she definitely wouldn’t be paying house calls for anything less than absolutely catastrophic.

She unhooked Chewie’s collar so that he could lumber to stand beside her, waiting for the command to relieve himself.

Ushering him on, he found his preferred mailbox, while Leia gave him some privacy by looking away. He yawned fabulously, not even bothering to lift a leg.

Under other circumstances, Rey would have made fun of him, but the sense of foreboding didn’t lift when she noticed Leia looking down the street after Ben Solo and his friends, long after they’d turn the corner and disappeared.

“I don’t come down here much anymore,” she admitted. “Though I grew up in town.” She glanced back at her. “Not much has changed since I left, truth be told.”

Rey didn’t ask when that was, and Leia’s thin smile made it seem like it couldn’t have been soon enough.

“I wanted to make a change,” she said. “It’s why I went into politics. I had hope for this town, and the world. ‘An unflagging, boundless quantity of it,’”she quoted. “Your grandfather once told me that. Also told me that to be able to do anything about a problem, sometimes you need to hold yourself at a distance from it so you can gain some well-needed perspective.”

Rey joined her, and Leia took her arm for support. Her hand was warm on her elbow, seeping into her bones and steadying her nerves. She found a tightness in her chest relaxing, peace flooding her on the exhale.

The Mayor smiled and gave her a squeeze, and Rey offered a tentative, confused smile in return at the sense of calm emanating from the woman.

Chewie butted his head into her thigh to announce himself, and Rey patted at him absently.

“I’m going to ask you to cultivate some of that distance for what I’m about to tell you,” she continued, worry pinching her brow. “I want to talk about your grandfather, and even though you weren’t close at all, that doesn’t mean the heart doesn’t know its tethers when it finds them.”

Not trusting her voice, Rey nodded. Uncertainty creeped in, setting up shop in the small spaces where her heart began to pound.

“Here’s the truth of it, Rey: Obiwan holed up in that house for almost two decades before he was found out in that corn field, and the only reason any one discovered him out there at all was because it appeared that there’s been a scuffle when some charitable citizen thought to come around looking for donations for the Good Will in Hanna City.”

She knew most of that, as it seemed to be the recurring narrative: the topmost layer of what most people seemed to know of Obiwan, but no one was quite able to say why that was, or what affected his decision-making process.

“I want to tell you this before you hear it from someone else who can twist things, leave you doubting someone who knew him personally before he stopped accepting callers.”

Her arm slipped from Rey’s grasp as the Mayor kept walking. Leia paused, turning to look back at her, squinting as if she’d forgotten her glasses. She frowned, nodding to herself.

“You knew him?”

She nodded apologetically. “As much as anyone can know anyone else who wants to keep their business to themselves, for whatever reason. He was an intensely private man, Rey — and that was before the bad years.”

“Twenty years?” Rey asked, as if confirming what she’d seen of the house and how long it had taken to get that bad.

The Mayor nodded. “And that’s not counting how long it took for him to push everyone that cared for him away.”

“Why?” Rey asked, catching her up, Chewie at her heels. “What happened?”

Leia clasped her wrist. “I was hoping that you would be able to help solve part of the puzzle,” she admitted.

Something weighted sank in her chest at that. Frowning, she understood, “But I never knew him, or my parents.” She sucked in a breath. “They left when I was young enough to barely remember them. There are days where —” She stopped, searching Leia’s warm brown eyes, feeling the words catch behind her teeth, turning bitter the more she tasted her own guilt. “— Where I don’t even remember —” She shook her head, looking away to conceal the sting in her eyes. She sucked in a breath. “I was young,” she said a little more firmly. “Barely four, from what I was told. All that I have of them are a few blurry, imagined memories that I’m not even certain are real, anymore.” She forced a too-bright smile. “That’s the problem of being that age; the intermingling of bedtime stories, films, even other sensory inputs mottle the things you think you remember. I don’t even have a photograph.”

She didn’t even know their names.

She lifted both shoulders in a shrug, shoving her hands into her pockets.

“I’m sorry that I don’t have the answers you thought I’d have.”

The Mayor sighed, tilting her head. “I can imagine that you’ve shouldered a lot of your own burdens,” she said. “But do you recall what I just said about having unflagging hope?”

Rey smiled a little at that. “I do want to help,” she confessed.

Leia nodded, taking her arm again. “Just bear in mind, you’re not my _only_ hope.”

After a while, Rey admitted, ”I came here to look for them, in my own way. It turns out that Obiwan was searching too.”

“Ah.”

Something about the Mayor’s tone of resignation made her heart sink a little.

“You’ve seen the house,” Rey said, a little more determined. “It might not be in good shape, but I’m not afraid of the search. I know he was waiting for something,” she said. “There can’t be another explanation for that sort of hoarding behaviour. No one, not even the truly mad, aims to prepare for the worst like that while saving every last scrap, receipt, and napkin in the process.”

She glanced at her.

“That’s not normal.”

“No,” Leia agreed.

“I think he was waiting for something,” Rey continued, stopping herself as a thought floated to the surface: Maybe Obiwan thought they’d come back for him, that they’d find him out here in the middle of nowhere if he was patient. He knew that she was out there — his granddaughter — maybe he thought that if he waited long enough, she might come back for him too. Maybe the house and all its accumulated junk was his way of preparing. Maybe he didn’t want to leave for fear that he would miss them.

She glanced at Leia, who watched her with a penetrating keenness.

“What was he waiting for, do you think?” Leia asked.

Her heart stammered as another, darker thought crowded in — a reminder of that desolation, surrounded by fields of gold for miles without another soul to so much as talk to. What happened when that grew to be too much, all of that nothingness? The whispers of the field and furrows keeping him company?

She shivered.

Maybe Obiwan was only waiting for the end of things, after all.

Rey chose the more positive of the two possibilities:

“Hope,” she said aloud. “I think he was waiting to find hope again.”

Leia smiled, but she turned away before Rey could determine the intensity of it; whether the Mayor believed something different than the other possibilities laid out before them.

“You’ve learned something,” Rey realized, voicing her conclusion aloud. “About his death.”

The gesture was so polished that she almost missed it for how easily the Mayor finessed the hesitation into the hitch in her breathing. She laughed — a light, polite sound.

“I tried asking some of the locals after him. Well, mostly, they broached he subject with me, first. They weren’t particularly forthcoming about what Obiwan was doing out there, nor why, but they did seem particularly interested in his land and holdings, however, and I didn’t realize that it might be a motivating factor in his death until Maz gave me a reason only a little while ago.”

To her credit, Leia appeared impressed. “You’d give some of my detectives a run for their money,” she said.

“Why didn’t you tell about the valuation? The land is worth millions.” Her voice hitched. For her whole life, she hadn’t had two nickels to rub together, and suddenly she was the subject of everyone’s interest because the grandfather she hadn’t known had left it all to her. “He didn’t even know me, and he wrote me into his will.”

Leia remained impassive. “The land isn’t worth anything at all if it isn’t being worked, and by our reasoning, it had been ten years at least since Obiwan dismissed his farmhands. There’s no profit to be made if you’re not nurturing the dirt.”

Rey sucked in a breath. “But it could be sold?” At a loss, no doubt — but it would still be worth several hundred thousand, at worst.

“There was no will, Rey,” Leia said.

It hit her like a slap.

“We found your birth certificate, and the inconclusive evidence of anyone else left alive who might step forward to claim it in six counties. By law, that means it passes to the last living relative.”

Her heart squeezed. “But you said yesterday —”

“I said that we couldn’t find your parents. We looked. We turned up nothing at all, save you. That’s why you’re here.” She searched Rey’s face, returning to stand before her, hands behind her back. Straight-backed, curious and searching her face for something that Rey couldn’t rightly say she was certain of. “You’re here because your grandfather’s death was far more complicated than we initially imagined, and I’m not entirely certain that you’re going to want to hear why that is.” She paused. “No one would.”

A world-weariness returned to her, bowing the woman’s shoulders in a way that suggested she’d carried several burdens over her lifetime, and none of them had gotten any easier.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing to a bench. Chewie did as he was told on the spot, and Rey gave him a sharp look.

As if to placate her, she took a seat herself, patting the peeled paint beside her. With some trepidation, Rey saw that the slab of wood had been dedicated to someone named Luke at one point, but the dates had long since worn off.

Chewie remained where he was — smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk, squinting into the sky and panting at nothing in particular. He’d remain in the same position for as long as she didn’t call him, or he didn’t see a squirrel.

Something about the pinch around Leia’s eyes suggested that she wasn’t going to appreciate what the Mayor had to share, a prickling wash of numbness stealing outward from her chest and prickling as it went. She nodded, fisting her hands onto her knees to brace herself as she sat.

The moment stretched — pulling like taffee and sagging the longer Leia contemplated her words, weighing whether or not Rey would endure whatever awful revelations the investigation into Obiwan’s death had spawned. She knew it was bad, she just couldn’t fathom _how_ bad.

“There’s no easy way to say this, and there’s a reason I didn’t want to tell you over the phone when I called you here.” She eyed her. “You seem like a tough cookie, Rey. If you’ll forgive the expression, it strikes me that you’ve seen some shit.” She nodded, more to herself than anything.

A hysterical giggle threatened to break the tension, the words incongruous with the pressed and proper demeanour the Mayor gave off. Of _course_ Leia swore, Rey reminded herself; it was just her bearing that made it seem like she’d go untouched by something so crass.

Ridiculous.

“People who’ve lived through hardship have a certain look about them. You see it in the eyes in this town — Junari Point is made of a people that endure. They survive against all odds. They do what they must to ensure that their families are fed throughout the winter. People will do desperate things to ensure their wellbeing.”

She looked across the street, staring into the ramshackle remains of something that might’ve once been a bait and tackle, long boarded over. Dimly, Rey recalled that Ben had said he lived out past a creek, beyond a bridge someplace.

“We have reason to believe that your grandfather met with foul play,” she said. She ran a tongue over her teeth, nodding to herself. “I want to be candid with you about the state we found him in, so that there’s no misgivings on your part; so that you’re not blindsided by some busybody in town who thinks they run the show; who thinks that they know something more than the police.” Her gaze narrowed. “Who thinks that they can lord that over you because you’re just here to clean up the mess he left behind.”

She sucked in a sharp breath, exhaling a sharp, singular, “Ha!”

Both knees bounced with nerves. She nodded a little too vigorously, dimly aware that she squeezed her interlocked fingers between her thighs.

She thought of Ben’s father — a blooming picture in her imagination that, even without context, was painted with enough technicolor that she could imagine the worst. Of him. Of Obiwan. These men she didn’t know, their bodies found far out in the field somewhere, limbs locked in the tangle of farm machinery exposing slivers of muscle and sinew — red and gold and grey.

Rey sucked in a breath, feeling the weight of Leia’s gaze. This was some sort of bear trap: a large vice she couldn’t escape once she’d skirted over it.

Fine, she thought to herself, her heart fluttering like a caged thing against her ribs. Fine.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Obiwan’s body was found naked in the West field of his property,” Leia began. “Naked, save for the markings on his person, and trauma to his feet from being barefoot on broken corn stalks. Some surface wounds that he might’ve sustained from running in the dark, but that’s merely speculative at this point, given the state we found him in and that time of death when unmarked carries a margin of error.” She didn’t smile. “Scratches — the wounds. Nothing that would have caused a fatality.” She frowned, holding up a hand and gesturing to the pinky and ring fingers of the right. “Two missing fingers, sliced off clean with a blade.”

A morbid thought crossed Rey’s mind, but before she could ask, Leia confessed, “We didn’t find them.”

“You don’t think —” she began, snapping her mouth shut.

Leia let her digest this new morsel of information a moment.

Rey’s throat worked, her words failing her. She thought of the house: its teeming corridors and cluttered halls, the stains lifting the old wallpaper and grime blackening the windows. The smell of the place — a mixture of long hours of dwindled forgetting stirred into the bottom of a whisky bottle, the sour taint of sweat on unwashed sheets. This had been a man spoken of fondly by those who knew him in the beginning; those who failed to witness the inelegant decline.

The slow lurch of the blood in her veins became a roar in her ears.

“You don’t think he cut them off himself?” It came out a whisper.

The Mayor’s eyebrows rose, considering it.

“I have my best detective investigating, Rey,” she said, smiling sadly. “This is the only time that I will ever say this: if Obiwan’s mind degenerated to the point where he felt that wandering into the corn field naked was the best option to end his own life, then it would be a fair shade better blessing for him than the alternative. I think,” she said, “that if he was that far gone, he wouldn’t have even guessed at what he was doing to himself.”

Rey chewed the inside of her lip, thoughts knocking into one another as they sped up, crashing along in a way that made her heart pound. “But you don’t believe that.”

That enigmatic smile was back. “Not a bit.”

“You think someone in this town did something desperate.” She swallowed, her mouth dry.

Leia only raised an eyebrow. “Stick around, kid. You’ll come to see that everyone’s got a shadow, even if it seems sometimes like they’re hiding under the noonday sun.”

Rising, Leia peered down the street. With a gesture, a police car rolled from its parking spot, crawling at a speed that was nearly predatory.

Chewie ruffed as if on cue, sensing the good Detective Dameron was nearby.

She snapped her fingers at him absently, a decision already unfurling the longer she sat there, weighing what Leia had told her. It wasn’t so much that she took herself to act on impulse, or that she ever let her feelings guide her to do things willfully — the thought of upsetting her Jakku vigil for longer than necessaryleft her uncomfortable, but here was a surfeit of history: there were secrets that rightfully belonged to her, now that there was no one left to claim them. There was no one left except her to do what was right.

She owed her grandfather that much: a little patience, a little salvage operation to know him better.

To know herself, perhaps.

To make sure he was at rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you know what a "spinning plate" re: story structure? It's when you have this one tiny thing -- this one itty bit plot element that you need to work in somehow because it opens a question that you intend to answer later in the story (you set a "plate" on a stick and you set it spinning, then you raise that thing over your head and balance it until you're ready to take it down with some sort of resolution, ideally one that whacks the reader in the head.) Well, I had this one spinning plate that has a couple of subsequent beats later in the story that I NEEEEEEDED to get in here during the edit. You likely won't even see it. It's just this little thing that I struggled for three hours to find the right place for so it wouldn't fuck up my flow. It's in here. I'm quite happy about it. 
> 
> Also, it's September, YAY!!! Happy Labour Day Weekend! Thank you for reading, I hope you're getting cooler weather and the leaves are starting too turn wherever you are -- or they will soon. I'd love to start posting the really ratchet chapters the closer we get to Halloween. 
> 
> Love and spoopy,
> 
> \- october


	8. Hafferkonig

At half past ten, she stood in front of the house with its gently-swaying corn fields hemming it in on all sides. From the foot of the porch, she took note of a mark similar to the one over the door of the diner, though this one had been scraped through revealing fresh wood beneath. With tentative fingers, Rey traced what was left of it, and found she couldn’t have discerned what it had been originally anyway:

“A protection,” Maz had said. It appeared that whoever had scratched out the mark had wanted none of that particular superstition.

Chewing her lip before the splintered gash left behind in someone’s haste, hands on her hips, the waft of the house carried to her on a breeze that did nothing to quell the sheen of sweat that stuck her teeshirt to her back:

The place reeked of neglect; of despair.

She bowed her head, listening to the whisper of dried corn husks, and deciding with some newfound resolve that while it felt nothing like the Jakku desert, the solitude wasn’t so foreign to her that she thought it oppressive. Ben’s warnings be damned.

She squinted at the lintel; at the house beyond; at the field to her left and Chewie panting on the porch.

“You smell like dog,” she informed him, but he only smiled in with his back teeth, contented indifference keeping him put.

Rey’s steps were more hesitant as she looped the porch, the sound of her steps as obvious as shotgun blasts in the quiet.

There were no further markings, as far as she could tell.

Curiosity had her seeking these small oddities out, as if their discovery would help her better understand the person Obi-Wan had once been.

Taking to the grass, she walked the perimeter of Kenobi house as if taking the whole of it in anew — searching for herself to see if she might spot whatever it was that had turned so many nights oppressive; if there was some indicator of the thing that had sent Obi-Wan crashing into the fields to draw his last breath. She wondered if he’d been forced; if he’d been chased by something of his imagination — or something else entirely.

The thought that she might stand on a murder scene had her calling for Chewie, marching into the kitchen with renewed vigour, eyeing the cleaning supplies she’d left on the table, but not quite ready to tackle the gore left in the fridge.

The news clippings gave her pause again. Fortified her.

A nervous ticking accompanied the sentiment — spreading from her stomach and into her limbs with nervous agitation that made her want to move. To shove boxes away from the windows. To scale the shelves and pull the dust-covered remnants back to a place where they might be handled; where she might touch these artifacts of a life that once had purpose and glean what she could of the man she’d descended from.

Candlesticks. Silverware. Cobwebs. Moth-eaten linens. Dirty towels. Broken dishes.

A turn around the house left her compartmentalizing each room, mentally dressing them down into parts as if the house were an engine that required repair, and she was the only person trained to fix it. She catalogued a split: intending to burrow through the bulk of it, separating the wheat from the chaff — so to speak — working from the insides out, the smallest nooks first: closets, drawers, armoires, then the larger storage so she could empty and remove the furniture for auction.

She’d use the parlour for items that required further investigation: anything of sentimental nature, or anything that might offer clues into her grandfather’s life, or the lives of her parents. Everything else, she’d trash. She’d scour. She’d clean with the fastidiousness of a monk.

Chewie forced a place for himself under the kitchen table as Rey took to the second floor, hands trailing down the lengthy corridor and contemplating to herself why the space felt so odd. As if something were missing but it remained just out of sight.

She checked the closets and under the beds, but, once again standing in what she took to be Obiwan’s bedroom, once more declined to draw the attic stairs out.

Another time, she vowed. Later, she promised — though, staring at the door in the ceiling once more, a humming nervousness filled her head the longer she considered it. It seemed as if the cord swayed just a little in a breeze that she couldn’t feel. The window was closed, besides. Rey’s fingers hovered near it, wondering at the slight disturbance, but didn’t move to grasp it.

The sound of a car in the distance drew her attention, and turning to the glass panes as if she might see who was coming, her shifting weight caused the floorboards to creak. Rey’s breath hitched, a slight movement snagging her attention from just beyond her peripheral vision. She turned, finding the door off the wall at an angle, and in the sliver of space between the wall and the dark behind it — a face mottled with rust and age. Pale eyes underscored with bruising. Mouth slivered through with stained patches.

Gasping, she lurched back a step, the backs of her knees catching the bed and her weight pushing at the mattress. The frame gave a halting, panicked groan of surprise, the springs wailing under her weight as she toppled backwards.

The face vanished from view, leaving only a glimpse of the spot she’d just stood.

“Shit,” she sucked down a breath, her heart jackhammering its way out of her ribs, and flung herself upright.

Her own face swam back into view — three feet lower than the floating vision from a moment before. Her pulse a caged thing now that she wrenched the door away from the wall, Rey found only herself painted in the mercurial stains of an old mirror resting behind the door.

Rey heaved a jittering exhale, taking note that she wore the scars from her battle with sleep in the crescents under her eyes. She appeared pale. Haggard, even. She forced a laugh, still — the whites of her eyes a little more pronounced as she forced herself to relax.

She escaped the second floor with shaking hands and a headache blossoming behind her eyes. Midway down the stairs, she thought she heard the bedroom door groan to shutting, but peeking through the rails of the banister, she found she was altogether wrong. Everything was at it should have been, though the silence rang with unspent tension.

Frowning, some sixth sense kept her lingering — paused midway down the stair, her body uncertain, suddenly, of what she might’ve been expecting when the urge to hurry elsewhere — anywhere — beckoned. Rey found she left sweat smears from her palms down the banister, her waiting and expectation turning into something that left her pulse thrumming.

On cue, a horn honked from the front of the building. She jumped, her heel slipping down a step in surprise. Chewie’s barking as he smashed through the screen door gave her a heart-heaving lurch, and yelling after him, she barrelled down the last of the stairs and into the grey outdoor world to find Hux and Phasma checking the stays on an industrial dumpster, tethered to an old tractor driven by an even older man. Even at a distance, she could see the spatter of liver spots over his knuckles like he’d been painted.

Seeing only half his face, Rey stalled to a halt.

Chewie bounded past the whole affair, unconcerned.

“Where do you want it?” he called, but Rey’s brain had yet to catch up to what she was trying to process:

The bisected flesh, the sunken eye-socket, the sense that his skull had been cleaved into and the pieces reassembled incorrectly — and yet, he’d survived. He swung his head around to face her, painting the picture in detail: cold, sharp blue eyes and a twisted mouth. Rising discomfort left her gaping, but struck with the impression, she felt nothing beyond pure, ringing horror at the grotesquery. Something about the way he smiled held her shame at bay, however: as if his face were a test meant to terrify children.

“Ma’am?” he said again, and Rey shook herself.

Her galloping heart refused to yield.

“Just by the house, please. Near the front door but not blocking it.”

He waved to say he got it as Chewie’s incessant barking as he romped around the truck turned hysterical. Though her voice was three octaves higher than usual, it didn’t stop her from yelling Chewie’s name in two shrill syllables that promised no treats for a week.

She called the dog over, and when whatever preoccupied him kept him from responding, terror bled into surprise, which dissolved into anger: Rey took off at a march — snatching the dog’s collar and heaving him back to the porch as Phasma guided the driver into the appropriate spot.

Snoke, Rey recalled: This was the man that Hux and Phasma had mentioned the day prior. She’d forgotten nearly all about it in the process of meeting Ben, and in receiving the news about Obiwan.

“In!” she ordered Chewie, but the dog whined, dragging her two feet to the drop where a stair sagged to the ground. 

“What is _wrong_ with you?”

She shoved him, forcing him back into the house, wishing she had telekinetic powers to make it a little easier for the frothing, excited animal. It was like trying to move a large, furry boulder. She succeeded, but he continued to whine, pawing at the door — all sense of his good training gone utterly to shit.

Turning as the tractor door slammed, Rey turned to find Snoke sliding out the side of his vehicle, sinking to a stiff hunch on solid ground. Even his clothes hung around his frame as if he was little more skin and bones, but he approached her with such an air of purpose that his skeleton-like appearance hardly registered. He met her midway up the fried lawn, long grass lashing her shins as she greeted him. The withered hand that grasped hers forced her to repress a shudder, raising the hairs along the back of her arm. She grit her teeth into a smile as he peeled back his teeth, and grinned.

“Quite an animal, you have there,” he said.

She swallowed her revulsion, unable to look away from his mangled face.

He gripped her harder, pulling her close to the point where discomfort made her stomach flip. The overly sweet scent of sweat and cooking grease assaulted her, punctured by the buttery slickness of Werthers and aftershave.

“He’s usually better behaved than that,” she managed.

Yellowed teeth appeared in a slanting stack, crowding half his mouth as if spilling from one side.

“Ah, young Rey. I sense a tenderness in you — something far removed in such desolate landscape as this.” That smile held, though his lips quivered, and his grip remained fast. She might’ve been leaning from him, but she didn’t stop herself. There was more to Snoke than just his offending nature — it was the surety and the demand of her attention as he inspected her as if she were an interesting, lesser insect. It left her with the desperate urge to heave up her merger breakfast onto his work boots.

Just as suddenly, Snoke let go. When he turned, it was from the hips — a stiff movement that wrenched him around at the midsection.

“_Hafferkonig_!” he bellowed, waving for someone in the tractor.

She let out a breath, taking the thinnest inhalation of fresh, untainted air before he could crowd her once more.

A door slammed and from around the engine stepped Ben Solo, the brim of his hat pulled low so that he watched her from the shadow, his mouth set in a hard line.

Behind Rey, Chewie went ballistic, the screen door bucking with his excitement, breaking finally as he put a paw through the rusted mesh.

“Shit,” she managed, turning. “Sorry! _Chewie_!”

Phasma and Hux exchanged a glance, the two apparent minions lingering near enough to eavesdrop.

Hux nodded to her when she caught his attention, smirking the whole while as if he’d been anticipating this meeting and couldn’t wait to spectate.

Chewbacca squeezed through the hole he’d made, barrelling forward, barking, to do something strange as anything she’d ever seen:

Ben unhooked a hand from a pocket, two fingers in a gesture of supplication towards the dog that loped towards him, tongue lolling and spit slinging in happiness, and in a bound — Chewie yawped, scuttling to a stop. Waiting a beat, he dropped his butt, chin thrust to the sky, eyes closed, and panting.

A perfect halt, though Ben had uttered no command at all.

The dog’s tail beat happily, once, against the earth.

Looking up, Ben glanced to her.

Rey’s heart chugged into a two-step, the beat doubling over itself as his eyes caught hers. She thought of what Maz had said about him, and looking around at the company he kept, part of her wondered, truly, if there was some truth in it: had Ben Solo killed his father?

“I understand you’ve met my, ah — apprentice,” Snoke said, gesturing.

“What did you call him?” she whispered, her thoughts sluggishly trying to process the docile way Chewielay down over his paws, looking for all the world as if Ben had somehow managed in a glance to train him.

“Rey.” Snoke said her name like he was breathing an incantation — a summoning that left her rooted. “Ben’s been under my careful watch for — oh, a decade, now, I’d say?” He opened his arms, and silent and watchful, Ben joined them. There was a stiffness to him that hadn’t been there when he’d come to talk the day prior. “It’s an old nickname, from childhood,” he said. “Something he’s — ah — had to grow into, I expect? Isn’t that right, Benjamin?”

He didn’t respond, choosing instead to level his gaze on Rey in such a way that her chest tightened, making it hard to breathe. Under the heavy silence, they appeared to be two young children, standing at the side of some ancient devil — Snoke’s scrutiny was like a boring drill, driving into her temple. A headache lit in the spot where Rey felt his stare. She turned away, feeling as if she bared her soul to him — all those thoughts about rusting farm machinery and blood splattering the corn leaving her head buzzing.

“How long might you be staying in Junari Point, Rey?” Snoke asked.

The question echoed, the silence oppressive. It occurred to her that there was something between them — this man and his apprentice, and that Ben deferred to him. This Snoke character was the apparent boss, and the other lackies let him do the talking when present. It also occurred to her that Snoke likely wouldn’t have come all the way out to Kenobi House if it weren’t important to make the appropriate introductions. The thought didn’t settle well.

She hitched a small, cold smile on her face, squashing the tremor she felt. “As long as I need to, I suppose. The house was left in pretty bad shape. It’s going to take some work to clear it out for auction.”

Snoke didn’t even bother looking at the house, his attention rapt, his smile trembling but constant. He pulled in a breath and the sound wheezed.

“Ah, getting rid of the old place, then? Burning it down outright would seem more appropriate. Got sadness in the soul of this old house — if you look hard enough, you can see the tear stains sliding down the face of her from the windows.”

“Something happen out here?” she ventured. “Something to give my grandfather reason to take his own life, I mean?”

It was cutting, and she intended it so. Rey waited, holding steady for the most part — this show meant as a demonstration: neither of these men would scare her off, though they might try.

Ben’s stare remained, a muscle in his cheek ticking the longer she stared. He said nothing, but she felt the weight of his gaze anchoring her, as if some kindness in him willed her to breathe in and breathe out; to welcome to this man who almost looked as if he wanted to be invited in for an iced tea. She wouldn’t. There was nothing in the fridge save the concern that she’d yet dealt with the mess.

Chewie yowled, and Ben glanced left.

It broke the spell. Snoke laughed, and the sound raised the hair on her neck. Ben knelt and Chewie seemed to come unglued, bobbing over to him with heavy steps. Calmer now, Ben placed a hand on Chewie’s back, patting him down as if he’d done well.

Scrubbing at the patch of cold sweat behind her neck, Rey forced a smile and took a step back.

“Nothing you likely haven’t seen for yourself,” Snoke said.

It was almost as if she could feel her ears pop with the tension.

“Oh, your grandfather was a peculiar fella alright,” he continued. “I knew him. Everyone knew old Obi-Wan Kenobi. Likely that you can find the stories for yourself in the town archives — Hux. Hux!”

The redhead looked up, hands clasped before himself, looking eager to lick Snoke’s boot for the simpering smile he wore.

“What was that last article about, in the Tribune? Obi-Wan done went running through town barefoot on Christmas Day with a kitchen knife, ‘bout ten years back — raving — and I mean, stark raving about ‘something in the crop’.” He didn’t wait for Hux’s answer. “I’ll tell you, the only thing out in these parts is a whole lot of loneliness; so much so that you think you start hearing things where there ain’t any voices but your own mutterings.”

He chuckled, the sound cresting into a high, deflating whine as he slapped Ben on the shoulder. He rose as if on command, Snoke’s spindled fingers resting high and long on his shoulder in a gesture that was almost possessive.

If Ben didn’t appreciate the contact, he made no sign, but Rey thought he might’ve been screaming silently in his own head.

She swallowed.

“I appreciate the dumpster, I can arrange payment as soon as —”

Snoke waved her off, closing on her once more. His breath had a stale tang that made her want to press her lips together, worried she might breathe in some of his sickness. She realized that was at least part of it: something degenerative was withering the old man, and it was likely a bloody miracle that he was upright at all.

“You just worry about your family business, young lady.” He nodded to the house. “You take care of what needs doing, and we’ll be back to help you unload it.” He looked her over. “I don’t expect you’ll be running off with my property any time soon. Besides —” He smiled thinly. “I know where you live.”

He glanced up at the house, his lip hitched in a sneer as he passed — that crooked smile a self-assured promise that he’d be back someday soon, she was certain.

Thinking the worst of it had passed, he turned back to Rey and Ben kneeling by Chewie at her feet.

“Oh, Rey,” he said. “Don’t mind the voices if they call to you from the field. The corn, y’ see, it likes to play tricks. Called it ‘feldgeister’ back in the old country.” He licked his lip, and Rey wrapped her arms around herself, trying to expose as little of her soft parts to Snoke as possible. “But it’s just the wind through the grain, girl,” he assured her without an ounce of conviction, his smile curling the words up at the edges like burning paper writ with promises. “Best to plug your ears, or turn up the television real loud when they do.”

He clapped Ben on the shoulder, but he remained stoic, unflinching and hard, his expression composed with careful indifference so as to reveal nothing of what he thought about this treatment: like Snoke would pat him like a well-behaved mongrel dog. Rey couldn’t reconcile it: she’d seen something more to him — she’d seen that he was capable of kindness as much as he could be cruel. 

Was it an act? Was she witnessing the true Ben Solo — little more than a puppet to his master?

Hux chuckled, but the sound was without humour. Even Phasma wore a thin smile.

They were trying to scare her, she realized: an effort that neither Ben, nor Phasma or Hux had succeeded at the day prior. A glance at the endless fields surrounding the house, and the near-memory of Obi-Wan lost out there — naked and bleeding as he chased down his own ends — left her lightheaded.

Ben rose as Snoke left them, regarding her with that placid expression; a mask that barely concealed the torrent of emotion roiling in his eyes.

She shivered, uncertain if the chill she felt was because of Snoke’s words of caution about the corn, or the creeping sensation of having unseen eyes turning to them, interested now that she’d been made aware of something more out there on the fields. The breeze rusted the stalks, bowing them low as Snoke passed: a king among peasants of grain.

Suddenly desperate to break the silence, she asked Ben in a voice that was barely above a whisper, “You don’t believe that, do you?”

His stare spoke volumes, the flicked glance to Snoke a shouted confession that he could neither confirm or deny that he bought into such nonsense in front of his friends; his colleagues. She wasn’t certain which category they fell into, but by some instinctive reasoning, she could see there was something different about Ben — like he was fighting a losing battle with himself to say something against Snoke that might contradict the power dynamic. When he failed to do so, irritation simmered into low anger, a sense of betrayal quick at its heels.

He dropped his gaze.

Rey raised an eyebrow, her senses prickling. The feeling of being watched rose in increments the longer they stood out there. She shivered.

“Superstition,” she muttered so low that only Ben might hear her, not caring to leave the disparaging dismissal from her tone. She hoped it was biting. She hoped it stung.

“I’d better get back to work,” she said louder, letting her voice carry. “Trying to move some furniture.”

“Is that so?” called Snoke, poised to climb back into the tractor’s carriage. He lowered his foot. “Benjamin, why don’t you stick around to help her with that?”

Rey’s hands curled, balling into fists in the crook of her elbow where she’d folded her arms. She smiled tightly.

“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary —”

Snoke ignored her, nodding to the house. “Old place like that must have a lot of real wood furniture. The handmade sort — used to use the barn out back to that ends; served as Obiwan’s woodshed, as I recall. Made some heavy stuff. Far too heavy for one little lady to go pushing around all by her lonesome.”

Her jaw began to ache with how hard she ground her teeth together. Sexist too. Oh, this guy was something — if he said anything to belittle Chewbacca, she thought she might actually snap. She’d trained the dog to respond to the command, “Sick balls,” but most of the time, he didn’t even need that much.

“It’s no trouble.” Ben’s reply was pitched so low that only she heard him — little more than a rumble of thunder before a storm. It didn’t sound at all convincing, but the steel in his tone wrenched at her attention.

She turned her head so fast her neck cricked.

The thought crossed her mind that without Snoke’s influence, he was a different person; that something else shaped into the man he was — _someone_, perhaps.

Cobbling the pieces together wasn’t difficult, even without all the details:

Ben had lost his father at a young age and he’d grown into a troubled young man. Snoke had stepped in, and the result of those efforts had shaped him into this brooding creature that stood before her, somber and unhappy with his lot, and uncertain how to fight it. Yet, she sensed there was more to him — she sensed that he didn’t wholly want to believe the stories he’d been told.

More, she saw the look in his eyes: that deadened glare. Some part of him was afraid of Snoke — he feared what he was capable of.

“Sure.” She heard herself say the word, but it didn’t register until she dragged her gaze from Ben and back to Snoke. Hitching her most convincing smile up, she nodded. “That doesn’t sound all that bad. With two of us, I might actually get the place cleared before the first snow.”

There was still hope for him yet, she decided. It was only a matter of convincing him to get away from the people that controlled him.

She forced brightness that she didn’t feel into her tone: “We can start at the back of the house.”

Ben watched her. Interested. Wary.

Snoke clapped, summoning his minions to him: Phasma hopped onto the back of the tractor, and Hux to the side where Ben had sat, smiling with smug satisfaction.

“It’s settled then. Benjamin — we’ll be expecting you at sundown for preparations.” He eyed Rey. “It’s Harvest Home,” he explained. “Traditional celebration in these parts.”

The festival. “I heard.”

Snoke fixed an eye on Ben, flanking her to her left. She started, the heat of his body so close and unexpected she nearly twisted into him. His hand hovered at her back without touching; a gesture that seemed as if he were about to catch her should she need to fall.

“Goes on until the last harvest —” Snoke showed her those stacked teeth again. “From sundown to sunrise, some nights — out in the fells past Silver Creek. Ben’ll tell you all about it, I’m sure — seeing as how he’s got such an important role to play this year, and all.”

Offering neither acknowledgement or good humour about it, Ben only stared. If a person’s body could be a ticking clock strapped to a stick of dynamite, he felt just about ready to explode. She stopped herself from reaching back to grasp his wrist, but the inexplicable urge to do so was there.

“You should consider accompanying young Solo, one of these nights,” said Snoke, turning the key in the ignition. It roared to life, humming to a vibrating purr and filling the yard with the oily scent of diesel exhaust.

Snoke shifted gears, not even looking at the controls as he called back to her, driving away, “Every king needs his queen.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have written descriptions of characters before that I've enjoyed, but none as much as Snoke when Rey first lays eyes on him in this chapter. 
> 
> Thank you for reading. Thank you for the kudos. Thank you especially for the comments and for keeping me entertained with your guesses as to how things notch together.
> 
> \- october


	9. Feldgeister

Tracking her through the first rooms of the house, Ben lingered as her shadow would, remarking on nothing but absorbing the work ahead in silence. Perhaps he’d cased the place before, but if he had, he didn’t remark on its condition, nor the smell; only expressing concern that the roof might leak should there be a hard rain.

Rey, however, felt his eyes on her back — a weighted consideration that followed her through each room, and up to the second story. She pointed out the bedrooms and their various states of damage — the heavy armoires and chest of drawers that would need to be emptied and hauled downstairs. The bed frames. The dressing screen. The mattresses.

Yes, it was altogether too much for just her.

No, she didn’t need his bloody help.

She didn’t pause at the overly long hallway, but it certainly stopped him in his tracks.

“What?” It fell from her mouth, razored and backed by the sense of overwhelm she felt: the forced politeness of showing a stranger through Obi-Wan’s home, desperate to remain stoic despite the encroaching shame she felt at revealing this part of her grandfather’s decline. Upstairs especially — though she couldn’t put her finger on why her stomach curled at the intimacy of revealing where she’d spent her first sleepless night.

To his credit, Ben didn’t flinch.

In fact, Ben didn’t say anything at all, and his gaze didn’t linger on her rumpled sheets.

He put his overly long fingers to the wallpaper in the hall, mapping it with his fingertips and a frown.

He rapped on it with a knuckle.

Turning those dark eyes up to her at last, he said nothing. Not even an apology for being forced upon her as he was. No explanation, either — not for Snoke’s obvious match-making attempt, and not for his utter lack of discomfort in _her_ space.

“I _know_ what you’re about,” she informed him.

A shadow crossed his expression at that, turning his mouth up at the corner. “You do, do you?”

He took a step, hands sliding to the wainscotting and running over the gouges in the old wood. He ducked his head, catching her gaze as she backed up a step, hitting the banister and grabbing at it. So sudden was the shift in his demeanour that it felt as if, at that moment, the clouds passing before the sun were aiding him in some nefarious attempt to scare her. His bulk took up the landing: a growing presence that crawled up the walls and settled in the corners of the ceiling, dimming the light.

He was probably inventorying the place for Snoke.

“Ah,” he said. “You do.”

She didn’t say as much. She didn’t have the chance.

The world tilted as she took a step back from him.

The pressure of his fingers cupping her elbow, preventing her from toppling down the stairs froze the moment. Featherlight and hovering, it occurred to her that he’d intended to catch her — a gesture that ran afoul of whatever sordid business the townsfolk might’ve concocted to dispatch her.

In surprise, her heel struck off with a _chunk!_ that jerked her as she dropped the six inches to the next lowest stair from the landing, and with a gasp at the contact, Rey slapped back to his forearm on reflex.

They gripped each other, the moment prolonged by the strangeness of it all; the uncertainty of what she’d agreed to at all in having him in the house with her.

“Well,” he said, his contemplation little more than a rumble in his chest — enough to make her shiver with the intensity of his gaze and knowing he was the only thing stopping her from falling. “Perhaps without such surprises, we should all hope for fewer restless nights.”

He drew her back to the landing, releasing her without lingering, but his touch seared through her sleeve though she escaped him; her skin warmed through her sleeve in the pattern of his grip.

She put Ben to work after that, propping the front door open to let the soggy breeze clear the place of its stale air and ancient smells clinging to the walls. With only enough interaction to separate out what might seem like personal effects, Ben was free to negotiate Obiwan’s belongings into an arrangement where she might select the items that held value — not monetary, but another sort of personal, sentimental treasure.

She watched him, of course. In surreptitious glances where it appeared he took no note of it — she peered around corners, and out of the corner of her eye. Just to see, she told herself. Just to make sure he wasn’t up to anything funny.

It was Ben who set a cushion in the first cleared corner for Chewbacca, who took up the position to oversee the progress as Rey settled into the adjoining dining room, working to get the table cleared of old food items and clothing.

With no door between the two, they might’ve spoken with each other comfortably, but Ben had resigned himself to the task, and had managed to orient himself away from her for the better part of an hour as he dug out the stove from a collection of cat food, though there were no other signs of an animal presence at the house.

For a long minute, he stood there holding a tin with Rey wondering something similar:

Had Whiskas become Obiwan’s preferred dinner once he’d forgotten how to use appliances?

She flushed, heat settling into her face as if she were somehow accountable for the state of things in the house. It was some time before the air because thick enough with the discomfited silence, that she finally, impossibly burst with a rush of breath and in a higher pitch than normal, “You said you spent time here, as a boy?”

Stopping what he was doing, the tin of cat food holding some mesmeric power over him, he frowned, tipped his head, and said to the floor, “I would have been too young to recall.”

Ben looked up, searching her face with a heaviness she often didn’t see amongst people their age — an invisible burden so great it pulled a person to earth and attempted to bury them.

She sucked her lip between her teeth, chewing on it with such an intensity that she almost missed the dip of his attention to her mouth.

“I just thought —“ she said, hovering on the edge of a confession and uncertain why she needed to tell him, of all people. “I thought it would be —” _Better_. “I came here with such a different picture in my mind, and the next thing I know there’s this.” She waved at the house around them. “And there are the stories about him — every one painting a slightly hazier picture than the last, and none of them good.”

His throat worked, looking for all the world as if whatever he had to say to that wouldn’t be enough to staunch the sting of it.

“I’ll get rid of these,” he gestured to the three sagging boxes of Purrfectly Fish entrees.

Rey frowned, nodding.

Though it must have been a hundred pounds, Ben stacked the selection, and stopped. “You’re not responsible for what happened to him here,” he said. “If that’s what you’re feeling. Other peoples’ lives remain theirs and theirs alone. The only thing you can control are the things that fit within the realm of your personal choice.” He looked away. “The rest of the world can burn.”

The house’s complaints creaked and groaned around them in subtle shifts, the wind outside working to rattle the panes as if to say they weren’t alone, despite the isolation of the unending fields outdoors. Somewhere, a clock ticked with laboured insistence.

“I didn’t even know he was here.” Her voice lilted into a brittle pitch. She rubbed dust from her eyes. “I realize that it’s silly to think I might’ve helped, but some part of me wonders if he wouldn’t have gone this way if he weren’t so alone.”

She heard him set the cat food down, followed by the creak of his steps as he lingered in the doorway between rooms.

His shadow swallowed the daylight from beyond, turning the whole of the dining room the comforting dark of twilight. He shifted, letting a slat of weak sunbeam fall between them, catching her hands and all the dust that rose on the air around them, the house silent and watchful, shadows crouching in the corners beneath years of neglect.

“You think this is your fault, somehow.” A hint of amusement drew her attention up. He wore a small smile, but his gaze had softened. “I’m not making fun,” he said. “It’s just a rare thing to see someone feel so much for someone who mightn’t have deserved the kindness. You didn’t know him.”

“What difference does it make?”

“It shouldn’t, but that’s not what we’re taught . You see him as kin, and regardless of what might’ve happened to him out here, you’d still take pains to see those restless spirits settled, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said.

“But what if they believe in you?”

“I thought that was the devil.”

“Him too. Him especially.”

Some amusement lingered, and Rey thought to scoff, but Ben didn’t smile.

She couldn’t keep the incredulity from her voice. “You know Baudelaire,” she said.

“And you have a rare kindness in you.”

She laughed without humour.

“There’s hardly anything funny about that, Rey. My old man used to say that you could measure the worth of a person by the lightness of their heart: problem is, no one really knows what’s heavier: love or despair.”

“What about hope?” she asked.

He made a noise of disparaging regret, one long arm reaching to notch his fingers into the lintel above the doorway, hanging there and contemplating her as if she were some exotic animal that had wandered entirely too far from the home she knew. He let out a breath. Shook his head.

“This is Junari Point. What’s hope in a place where dreams go to die with the crop?”

She looked at the assortment of junk before her: a collection of Sears catalogues bound with string, a knotted rat king of twines and ties, water stained advertisements.

“The trash, I think,” she muttered.

He sniffed a laugh, but not because he thought she was being funny. Still, something about the sound warmed her. Rey didn’t look up, concerned suddenly that he might see the deception plain on her face if she showed it to him:

His company wasn’t awful.

She didn’t _hate_ it.

In fact, Ben’s appreciation was a small ember in a cold fireplace, lighting a warm spot in her chest.

She just — couldn’t. Not knowing a thing about the man other than the speculation about him, his involvement with Snoke? It didn’t fit. A piece of the puzzle remained misplaced. Misaligned, somehow.

Still — he might’ve easily let her tumble down the stairs if he was as bad as people believed him to be.

And —

“You like to read,” she tried, not looking at him.

A beat, the air seeming change between them: like a hitched breath, he considered her and the quickness that she’d flipped the conversation to casual interest.

Like it was an olive branch.

Rey licked her lip into the space between her teeth. Chewed a moment before giving in and looking up.

Those dark eyes watched her with wary interest, too.

“Our library has a pretty pathetic offering,” he admitted. “But on the nights when the electric blows out, you don’t get none too picky about re-reading the same things.”

Another beat.

“Wuthering Heights,” she confessed.

“Paradise Lost,” he offered in return.

“Jane Eyre.”

“Faust.”

She fought back a smile. Glanced away.

“I didn’t have many books in Jakku growing up,” she confessed.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

“Well, like I said, I didn’t have many books in Jakku growing up.”

A smile played around his mouth. “I meant Jakku.” There was something reverent about the way he said it, as if he knew some part of her innocence might’ve endured that wasteland when others might’ve been hollowed out, eroded down to mere slivers of who they might’ve become.

She raised the eyebrow, unsettled all of a sudden by the quiet tones their conversation had sunken to — a whispered conversation in secret between lovers. She shivered, nodding to the kitchen he’d come from.

“If you get rid of that cat food, I will.”

He glanced back with a frown. “I think some were left half-eaten.”

“All the more reason.”

“Have you cleaned your fridge?” he asked, pushing off the doorframe.

A single, dour look got him moving — long legs and strong arms hefting the boxes that might’ve taken her three trips alone to get to the dumpster.

“I hope you bought bleach,” she heard him say, and smiling into her chest, she shoved the contents across the table and into a waiting garbage bag.

An hour later, and the dining room had been cleared enough to reveal an old ice box, a stack of magazine cutouts, old chicken feed, several mason jars of preserves, two shoe boxes worth of correspondence (mostly bills, the vast majority unpaid), and a collection of bottle caps as well as an old toolbox that Rey set aside, thinking she might investigate it later.

No photographs. No letters. No legal documents. No journals anyplace.

She’d answered most of Ben’s questions; where she’d grown up, what the desert was like, had she been to Niima or the oasis past the marching dunes.

(In foster care. Hot. Niima was overrated anyway.)

She did her best to paint a picture for him, but the badlands weren’t much to talk about, unless you counted the old ship graveyard — a relic from a time before she was born that remained as a monument for the lives lost in the war. She didn’t tell him that she’d spent a fair chunk of her youth squatting in one of the felled aircrafts that occupied that part of the desert, nor how she’d only been evicted from her spot once Unkar Plutt had found her and “taken her under his wing”, which had basically amounted to the junker threatening to have her arrested for trespassing if she didn’t pay her keep.

In exchange, she peppered him with an assortment of questions of her own: what was it like growing up on a farm, did he know how to milk a cow, could he ride a horse?

(Quiet. He did. He could, but preferred his truck. Or a tractor. Or anything mechanical that wouldn’t buck him off if he was in a bad mood because horses had the innate ability to sense that he was pissed off.)

“Where did you get the truck?”

It struck her as odd, at first, and glancing back to where he’d made the first concerted attempt at dislodging the couch cushions from where they’d found their way atop an old curio cabinet stuffed with moth-eaten blankets, she frowned.

“The Falcon?”

There was a subdued intensity to the question that she didn’t immediately pick up on: a forced casualness covering it over and making it seem innocent enough. She paused, for the first time wondering since they’d begun talking, if she’d already told him too much about herself.

When Ben looked up at her silence, a line of dirt smearing him from cheekbone to temple, something unwound in her chest. Sitting on a milk crate with his too-long legs bracketing his chest, he looked like a teenage boy who’d experienced the violent brevity of a growth spurt.

She thought of the things that remained unsaid, the questions she wanted to ask but kept chickening out on.

He folded a record over in his hands, a careful calm keeping his attention on her rather than the vintage Fleetwood Mac record in his long fingers.

“You call it the Falcon.”

She nodded, though it occurred to her that he hadn’t phrased it as a question.

“It was actually the ‘Millennium Falcon’, but even for me, I thought that was a little much. Borrowed it from my boss,” she replied with forced casualness.

“Borrowed” might’ve been a bit of a misnomer. She hadn’t actually asked permission in the first place, but Plutt hadn’t been fast enough to catch her as she’d rolled the heap out of the garage, popped Chewie in the back, and gunned it for the interstate before he’d even realized she’d left.

“At the garage,” Ben pressed.

Had she told him that?

Rey nodded, doing her best to smooth her discomfort. “Yup! My boss has quite a collection of vintage cars.”

Though she’d technically “borrowed” the least assuming and least offensive of the lot, any slight against Plutt or his property might’ve had the cops hot on her heels, had she given him any indicator of where she was going — which she hadn’t: the vaguest details had sufficed, so Rey continued to breathe easy.

Ben Solo, however, was a wildcard.

“He likely stole the thing,” she said. “But from whom…” She shrugged. “I’ve found it best not to concern myself with where the vehicles come from that I’m fixing, nor where they go when I’m done.”

He made an interested noise at that.

She shot him a look. “Because I like to _eat_.”

“Ah. And buskering the Jakku desert is hardly a lucrative profession, I’m sure.”

He threw a rare, wry smile in her direction, and though she pretended to cough over it, that flash of teeth encouraged the briefest hitch in her breathing.

“We must be working too hard,” she said. “I swear I think you just made a joke.”

She turned away before her knees gaze out, the full intensity of his grin a brief, shining thing in the dim confines of the parlour — like a star going supernova — there and gone in a flash that lit the room.

“Do you want this couch?” he asked.

“Yes, but we can haul the rug out once there’s enough space back there to get the couch out of the way.”

It had stains, besides.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked, placing the records back into the crate, and eying the next largest piece of furniture that required clearing off before it could be unloaded. A buffet sat against the wall between rooms containing what it was actually supposed to: plates and silverware stained beyond belief.

She looked up when he didn’t continue, finding him watching her with an intensity that brought a color to her cheeks.

“Why did you come here?”

It seemed as if a thought flitted behind his dark eyes — a shadow passing over the sun, eclipsing the lighthearted conversation she’d reluctantly enjoyed since Snoke had seemingly thrust them together. She found she hadn’t been altogether ungrateful for it, though it had taken at least an hour before Ben’s tension had uncoiled with the work of lifting and dropping and shoving things around. Dust and grime coated them, her hands were sticky with it, and not knowing what else to do with herself, she smeared the mess down her thighs, trying to choose her explanation with a little more delicacy than she was used to.

“You said, yesterday, that this was meant to be a brief trip.”

She nodded. Hesitating, she took a wobbling step around a box. A few feet apart, still, she dug a small, folded square from her back pocket, and unfolded the crease she’d put into it.

Holding it up, she revealed the photograph that Leia had given to her with the other artifacts in Obi-Wan’s tin box: her grandfather and her infant self. The only evidence she had that she’d known him, once.

Ben glanced at it briefly, turning that same penetrating stare back to her, as if he might pull her apart to know her heart. Her very soul.

Ignoring how her hands shook, Rey tucked it away again for safekeeping.

“I need more than just this.”

It was a time before he spoke again, the silence choked with some undisclosed understanding between them.

“I can only imagine that means there’s something important back in Jakku that you need to get home to.”

The smile she offered was forced, trembling a little at the edges. She shrugged, one-shouldered. “My parents left when I was a young child. I’m not entirely sure why, but I expect it was important. I know they’ll come back for me, so it’s important that I’m there. It’s important that I wait for them.”

It sounded hollow. Silly, even.

He didn’t challenge it. He didn’t say anything at all, really — but doubt painted his features in a different shade, and Rey couldn’t be certain that it was his doing at all, but only how she saw his expression change.

“They _will_ come back,” she insisted. “They have to.”

An absent glance at the kitchen, and she knew Ben was thinking of the numerous obituaries that Obiwan had papered to the fridge and wall.

“They can’t be dead,” she said, like it was simple fact. “I know it looks that way, because clearly, my grandfather was looking for them too, but they can’t be. I’d know it if they were.”

“You never knew them,” he murmured.

“I’d exhausted every resource that I could, but it’s hard when you don’t have names, or birth certificates. They left me with literally nothing, and I was so young —”

She slapped both hands down on the stack of magazines in front of her, proceeding to pick at the twine that bound it together.

“When I got the call from Mayor Organa, I thought it was a joke. I had a grandfather — I _came_ from somewhere.” There was a tightness in her throat that hadn’t been there before. “But the thing I can’t reconcile for myself is, if Obiwan knew where I was all this time — why wasn’t I important enough to him to come find me. If he knew my parents were --” She paused, struggling with the word ‘gone.’ “_Missing_. He _chose_ not to seek me out.”

“Maybe he didn’t know where you were.”

“He had my birth certificate,” she said dully. “It’s far easier to track a person down when you have something like that to work with. That’s how Leia knew how to find me.” She glanced at him. “Mayor Organa, I mean.”

“I know.”

She looked up.

Ben clarified, so quiet she almost misheard, “I know who she is.”

Rey sighed, dragging the stack off the desk and tossing it into the hall with sliding mountain of refuse they’d shovel into the dumpster later.

“I came here because I needed to know where I come from. Who I am.” She slapped her hands to her hips, kicking the leg of the table. “I thought that maybe there would be clues here that would help me find them.” _I thought that maybe_, she thought to herself, _that there would be clues that would help me find myself in all this: where I belong._

Wiping his upper lip with the back of his hand, Ben joined her, dragging a chair out for her to sit in, and finding one for himself from the kitchen when the others proved too rickety to test.

“Maybe I would figure out a better sense of where I’m supposed to fit.” Giving him a weak smile, she propped a knee beneath her chin, hugging her leg to her chest. “Apparently the junk yard was the right choice to begin with.”

His folded his large hands together, fingers weaving into a pattern that held her attention longer than it should have. A muscle ticked in his jaw.

Rey waited, watching the shadows play over his features as he wrestled with something in silence. She sat up a little, curious. He dropped his cap on the table and afforded her a singular, furtive glance — shame turning him pale.

“I understand the challenges of being apart,” he said. “From family, from where you come from. There are things that are easier about being alone, I thought, when I was younger. I made choices that I hoped would make things… less painful.” He drew his lower lip between his teeth, the movement hypnotic as his mouth disappeared into his beard. He looked left, showing her the profile of a man who’d grown weary with hardship. He took a breath, and on the exhale, confessed as if he’d found himself in a church, speaking with a priest, rather than an orphaned girl uprooted from the place she might’ve belonged in another life:

“I lost my mother as surely as I did my old man, when my father died,” he said. “I was fifteen. And I was angry at the world. I was angry for their expectations, and I blamed him because I was never enough.” He looked at her side-long, shaking dark waves of hair back from his temples. “I thought I’d be better off without them for a very long time.”

She said carefully, “You never reconciled.”

He only stared, the sound of Chewie’s wheezy breathing and the ticking of an old clock wending through the house, the wind outside gentle through the corn.

“You’re right to be afraid, Rey. The stories you’ve doubtless heard of me —” Something dark skirted his expression. “You should think me a monster for the things I’ve been accused of.”

“Is it true, then?”

Knuckled whitening, she watched as he coiled within himself, as restrained and tempered as a snake waiting to strike.

“Death is closer to the people in these parts,” he murmured. “We grow up with it.”

The chair dragged as he stood, the sound raising the hair on the backs of her arms. Ben cut an imposing figure when he towered over her like this, his shade falling across the table, inching in tendrils towards her and Rey, shrinking back into her chair, worried for a moment that his darkness might touch her.

“It lives beside us for all our lives — in our homes, our barns, our chicken coops. We take what we need from the land, and we give back what we can: till the soil, mind the seasons as they pass, observe the night when it comes and keep the lights lit as we need to keep ourselves safe. It’s our way.”

“What happened to him?” she asked. “To your father? To Han Solo?”

“An accident.”

He didn’t hesitate: a simple explanation that remained echoing and hollow.

Regardless, it seemed that whatever burden Han’s death had created in him, it had become a burden for him to carry.

Ben turned away from her, moving through the house with careful, plodding steps, as if something lingered in the dust and detritus that he might wake if he weren’t careful. Fingers trailed old smears on the door frame. Something remarkably sad weighted him. He didn’t look back.

“My father fell into a combine when I was fifteen,” he said.

His words caught her up in a tide that made the ground seem to tilt.

He appeared as if he wanted to say something further, but when he turned back, the words failed him.

“Nothing good comes from digging into the past, Rey — even in small towns where it seems as if nothing happens.” He tugged his hat back on his head, smoothing over the crown — a king without anyplace to rule. “Best to leave some things buried.” He sniffed. “Walled up, I suppose — as necessary.” He glanced at her. “Obi-Wan seemed to have the same idea.”

She frowned, her brain still ticking things through — stalled and not ready to catch up to whatever truths he was willing to offer.

“I don’t understand.”

Waiting a beat, he stared. “The hall upstairs?”

The extra-long, dark stretch of wall that felt misplaced.

“It’s hollow,” he explained.

He’d knocked on it, too, and so preoccupied with having him in her space, she hadn’t rightly registered what he’d been doing. Rey stood, a frown on her face and her heart giving a little lurch. She held his gaze as long as she could before leaping from her chair and taking the stairs two at a time, searching for herself what felt misplaced as she rapped on the wallpaper in two — three places, the sound changing as she did.

“Shit,” Rey breathed.

At the foot of the stair, Ben rested an elbow on the banister. He tipped his cap back, squinting upward into the long stretch of hallway.

“It’s a false wall?” she hazarded.

Ben gestured for her to follow him, and she thundered down the stairs, pushing Chewie back behind the screen as they crossed the porch and into the dry grass as Ben led her around the side of the house. He pointed at the windows, counting as they walked. When there was one more than there were bedrooms, Rey blew out a breath.

She pushed her hair back from her forehead, and said once more, “_Shit_.”

Nothing was visible from the outside save a thready curtain and more grime.

“Easy to overlook,” he offered. “Unless you’re looking for it.”

She glanced at him. Raised her eyebrows. “It’s twice you’ve suggested I don’t dig.” She pointed at the fifth bedroom, blocked off behind drywall and stars-knew-what. “How about a little demolition, instead?”

—

Barricaded with a chain that crumbled under her touch, it took more than a little persuasion to heave open the great double doors to the barn. They protested the whole while, and once they’d allowed enough clearance to allow the dim sunlight in, they also let out the scent of rot and mouldering hay. Petroleum and shit.

At Ben’s suggestion, Rey agreed to open it up, but much like Pandora’s Box, she suspected that the doors on the building wouldn’t close again unless the entirety of the structure had been voided and its bones levelled. It felt precarious enough to stand in the barn’s entryway, looking up to the rafters and seeing nothing but stirred dust motes and grey shapes on the loft.

If there were tools, she didn’t see them immediately. The entire back of the building was wreathed in darkness.

“Maybe we shouldn’t —” was an afterthought that didn’t stop him as Ben ducked inside.

Rey lingered in the daylight, worrying her lip as she considered what it might be like to try and dig her way out from the building’s collapse.

Shapes in the gloom resolved into old farming equipment, indeed — much of which proved itself entirely useless, given the state of neglect of the few things she recognized inside:

A pitchfork. A shovel. A decrepit tractor. A series of ancient canisters that looked like they might’ve held some fossil fuel or another. Kerosene. Gasoline. Some sort of other-ine. Crates and pallets. An old wood ladder, barely holding together, led heavenward to the loft above.

Ben’s figure resolved against the leftmost wall, heaving something along in his hand that made Rey’s breath catch:

The shadows fell from his shoulders, shaken off in the dreary surrounds that softened his edges — bleeding his body back into the greys and gloaming of an unintentional twilight. He stood at the heart of the barn a moment, eyes raised the holes in the roof, and for a moment, it appeared that the tool he carried was a scythe, and he — some earthbound and fallen thing — had somehow lost his way.

“Ben?” she called.

When he stepped back into the light, she saw he’d found himself nothing more than a mallet. Paint-spattered and caked with dust and grease, but it appeared solid. It looked like it could put a hole into where a hole was needed.

He paused, looking her over once, and coming to some decision he asked, “Are you sure?”

Wordless, too nervous all of a sudden to think herself capable of forming a complete sentence, Rey led him back to the house.

—

Chewie whined from the bottom of the stairs with plaintive insistence, his tail beating at the hardwood in faltering thuds for a time before his interest waned and he slumped before the front door. Standing before the wall that wasn’t a wall after all, Rey found herself eyeing it as if the house had lied to her.

“You can use your fists, if you like,” Ben offered.

She pressed her lips into a thin line.

Uncertain if she could be justifiably peeved about it, she was somehow managing it. For a house with so many secrets, she’d turned up nothing of value so far in her search other than the utterly obvious revelations that Obi-Wan had clearly gone quite mad.

“There’s not been anything of sentimental value in the house,” she whisper-hissed. “Don’t you think that’s odd?”

He raised his eyebrows as if shrugging with his face. Frowned. “Perhaps the things that he held dear to him weren’t material.”

She glared.

“Or perhaps they were strategically hidden in a place that he wanted completely inaccessible,” he amended. Because yes, Obi-Wan was indeed perfectly on the level and utterly sane, and what else would you do when you wanted to hide the things you didn’t want found?

Rey chewed her lip.

She studied Ben’s features — the strange constellation of moles and freckles that stood stark on his skin; his too-large lips and the ears that he couldn’t quite hide under his mane of dark hair. He wasn’t a pretty man, but… striking in his intensity. Handsome where strangeness willed out.

_My father fell into a combine when I was fifteen._

The buzz of tinnitus filled her head, a question rising to the surface that she thought she might already know the answer to: had Ben been there when it had happened?

It was a moment before she realized he too was scrutinizing her, and not in any way that she found unsettling. Rey sucked in a breath, fighting the prickle of heat in her cheeks when she tore her gaze away.

“Do you want to do the honors?” asked Ben.

She couldn’t be certain if he was making fun of her, and wordlessly, she took the mallet from him.

“There,” he pointed before Rey could swing wide. “Watch how you arc, or you’ll catch the opposite wall. Put out a window if you’re real unlucky.”

He stepped back, hands in his pockets, an inscrutable calm settling on him as he watched her work. No judgements, here, she thought.

The mallet lodged into the plaster, trickling dust and earning a grunt from her at the impact. It juddered her bones in a way that tickled numbness.

Rey muttered a curse. Wriggled it, wrenching plaster, and stared at the black hole she made with nothing else to show for it.

“Again,” he said. “Make it bigger.”

Her hands slicked the shaft, and she drew back again. This time, she roared something unintelligible as she struck, and the mallet collapsed through the wall — taking out a larger chunk — and the tool with it.

“Good.”

Ben peered into the hole. Fished the blasted thing out, and seeing her panting, urged her backward to avoid getting clipped. His efforts were quicker, the violence of his strikes sure and controlled as he hammered at the hole — pulling at the broken pieces with a ferocity that left dust and wall and insulation powdering the upper landing. He worked with the sort of grace that built a rhythm, and when she found she could stop flinching at his strikes, Rey found a melody to it: a battle hymn of sorts, his strength and size metering the cadence. She’d never expected to see such peace masking his features as he stood back at last, set the hammer down, and lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe his face.

She turned away from the corded muscles of his stomach, her face heating, and stared at the thing he’d revealed as he too leaned in to trace his fingers over what they’d found.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Rey swore: taking in the welded hinges. The bolt work. The wood planks and nails holding it together. Glue? Mud? She leaned closer, but thought better of it when she saw not only straw mixed in, but hair too.

It was Ben who breathed a disbelieving, “Shit,” as they stared at the door. Sealed shut.

The two-inch gap below it was visible, and dropping to her knees, and then her belly, Rey strained to see something more than just blurry sunlight beneath it.

She slapped the floor a moment later. Gave it a good _thwap!_ with a fist when nothing further resolved itself in the dusty sunlight beyond the gap.

“Gonna need something else to get in there,” Ben said. “I think this is cement.”

An axe. A jackhammer. She rested her head on her folded hands. Groaned in irritation. What did you use to undo welding like that? A blow torch? They’d sooner light the place on fire.

“Ridiculous,” she said, shoving herself to her knees.

“Like I said,” he offered. “Not all folks want their secrets dug up.”

Ben offered a hand up, but staring at his fingers, Rey only glowered. She fixed him with the same look.

“What interest do you have in my grandfather’s past?” she shot back.

He didn’t have an answer to that.

She shoved herself to her feet, not bothering to thank him now that he’d managed to sour the experience.

Eyeing him, a thought scuttling around her brain, she voiced her suspicion, “Why do you care what my interests are in my family’s history?”

Staring, Ben didn’t falter as she glowered up at him.

“It seems almost as if you’d steer me from it, but what I can’t figure out is why.”

He searched her features.

“You know something,” she pressed. “You know something and you’re not telling me. Why.”

Unmoved, they remained locked together like that: a battle of wills that brought her within inches of him — a foot difference in height and Rey found she’d set herself squarely into his personal space, glaring for all she was worth as if it’d wring the truth from him.

He’d helped her, after all — there was something within him that wasn’t as bad as his reputation. Surely.

His lips barely moved, the air thickening by increments. Ben raised a hand as if to brush a lock of hair from her face, and then thought better of it. Made a fist instead. Stepped back, returning to himself. “I’d spare you the hurt of it.”

Brushing past her, Rey recoiled, watching him descend the steps to the floor below utterly uncertain of what had only just transpired in the spaces between words and gestures, the silence laden with something that begged for freedom, and he — he’d left it chained. Whatever it was.

She let out a breath she hadn’t been aware she’d been holding, and followed.

“Is this about your father?” she called after him, emboldened now that she wasn’t utterly drowning in his scrutiny. “Some experiences overshadow who we become, Ben. I understand that — I know all about how to second-guess my decisions, and of this I’m fairly certain —”

Ben took a breath and it sounded strangled. “No.”

Chewie left his post, trotting past them with a whack to her thigh from his tail.

She found him through the parlour: backlit by the light filtering through the kitchen.

From where she stood, she couldn’t see his expression.

“Would that I could spare you from anything of the sort,” he murmured. “Anyone, really.”

She snorted.

“But you know all about me,” he continued. “So there’s no reason in clarifying the obvious. You’ve heard it before.”

But she hadn’t, and now that he had her attention, Rey found her heart beginning to chug against her ribcage.

With his head bowed, he murmured, “I found him, of course.” Tilted into profile, she could only listen for the smallest lilt in his delivery: “I couldn’t save him.”

Ben turned away entirely, and taking a hesitant step towards him, Rey’s stopped before the threshold of the back of the house: as if it were a line that divided them.

“That’s the ruse of small towns like this, Rey: we’re so closely knit that we imagine we’re never as far apart as we are. We’re all alone in the end, anyway.”

It occurred to her that he stared onto the open field behind the house, through the back door. Chewie made a noise of protestation, struggling to stand as Ben vanished around the corner. His footfalls tread in slow, sure steps — Ben’s heavy boots waking the parts of the house that had been left dormant for too long.

When he returned, he’d found a scrap of paper and, pulling a pen from a back pocket, wrote something across it. He tacked it to the wall near the phone by the fridge.

Tapping the plastic apparatus with the pen, he said, “Landline. Might seem archaic, but cellphones are notoriously unreliable out here.”

A small, forced smile vanished as quickly as it appeared. Something distant in his gaze got her moving —following him to the kitchen, drawn to him across whatever wreckage they’d left in their wake as they’d tried to make sense of the mess. Honestly, the place looked worse for their trouble, but it wasn’t the state of the house that left her heart jackhammering:

She meant to touch his arm, to draw his attention back to her, but she stopped herself.

He’d turned back to the field, his burdens carefully tucked away into faint frown lines and the tightness of his posture.

She hesitated to say she was sorry, because what for — she couldn’t rightly be sure, other than that she’d caused him pain by bringing it up.

“I’m sorry.”

His eyes on distant thunderheads — watching for a rain that never seemed to want to fall out here, leaving the land parched and the crop starving — Ben didn’t acknowledge it at first. That steady gaze looked long into the fields beyond the glass, watching for something that Rey herself couldn’t see, though a thought scurried by, harrying at her with some insistence.

What was the word Snoke had used to describe the corn?

Ben’s attention brought the heat to her face.

“Sorry,” she said again, this time, she wasn’t sure about what: for embarrassing herself or for seeing him hurt and somehow being the cause and reminder for the things he couldn’t change.

It was a moment further before he nodded.

“You call that number if you need something.”

She’d hurt him, and by some measure of her own foolish conscience, she realized that she didn’t want him suffer any more pain — by her causing or otherwise.

“Ben --“ Rey began as he turned, but Chewie interrupted.

For his part, Chewie might've been an old dog, but when something nipped him in the butt, he found that his sheer size more than compensated for any misplaced subtleties. This time, the peal of his barks rang around the house with deafening abandon as he ploughed through the stack in the hall, scattering the mess they intended to throw out, and smashed over two chairs and a settee before barrelling past them through the kitchen.

Not even Ben's particular breed of witchcraft could stop the dog as he knocked between them, lunging for the screen door at the world beyond.

Caught off-guard and off-balance, Rey hardly registered her pinwheeling arms as arced towards the linoleum, her feet flung out from beneath her. A calloused hand snapped out, snatching her by the elbow at the last possible opportunity, and she jerked at the collision, tasting flannel and body heat as Ben's arms enveloped her.

Muscle under cotton. A broad chest. The scent of a man built for trouble to find him -- she recognized all these things within the span of a blink and a heartbeat, and the world breathed Ben Solo. Strange, how quickly all her sensorial inputs flared -- how she could marvel at the span of his fingers over her hip, or how easy it was for him to scoop her up before she smacked her head. Gallant, she thought -- misplaced in the chaos and floating, like she was a drifting balloon looking down on the madness in Obi-Wan's kitchen below.

Ben's other hand hit the table, shoving it into a wall and catching there before they both struck the floor. They stuck, and time caught up to them as Chewie rammed into the kitchen door, frothing and barking for all the world as if it were about to end.

"Chewie!"

She didn't register shoving away from the man that had caught her, though later she would remember the drift of his fingers across the thin fabric of her teeshirt and imagine she could recall that warm touch.

They shouldn't have left the screen doors open.

She flew at a stagger, throwing herself forwards, sneakers skidding as the thought of Ben's warning to keep Chewie tied up flashed as sharp and vicious as the belief she'd had that her dog would never, ever dare to bolt like this —

He all but took the door off its hinges as Chewie made a break for freedom.

Rey didn't hear Ben hit the ground. She didn't feel the burn in her legs as she flew from the porch and struck the lawn. She only felt her limbs flying out as she threw herself bodily at Chewie, fingers snaring his fur, and her poor pup, craning with fear at his mum as she descended upon him in a rush and then ignoring it altogether.

"No, you idiot dog." She swore, pain registering in her knees where she'd skidded over grass, her arms wrapped around Chewie's midsection as he dragged her forwards, still angling for the crop but with the added momentum of a small human behind him. Rey scrabbled to dig in her heels, her legs tangling as finally, Chewie dragged to a halt at the edge of the lawn. Face pressed to his fur, she smelled overheated dog, and the powdery scent of grain mingled in the dirt: sweet and green undercut by chalky earth.

"Dumb puppy." She squeezed him, her heart jackhammering. Still, she didn’t look up. An inkling of discomfort suggested she might not like what she saw, when she did: all manner of horror took up occupancy in the place of not knowing what had so stirred him, when the reality was likely a rabbit or a raccoon trundling amongst the furrows.

Being a desert dweller left Chewie’s only exposure to armadillos and the occasional lizard, but neither left him such a frothing mess. 

Kneeling, her knees gradually soaking through with the damp soil, Rey looked up. The spaces between the corn with the last thirty-seconds catching up to her all at once.

Chewie gave a last, plaintive bark, and she crushed him to her.

"Stop it."

Fear filled the places where her strength failed, and yet -- she watched the corn, waiting as if to deny that something might resolve itself in the gaps between the stalks. Waiting, as if she expected something might.

The shrill whine of the screen door slapping shut announced Ben’s presence in the backyard, his footfalls heavy over the back porch. She wrenched her attention around, unwilling to let go of the dog though he'd stopped straining.

He remarked, “He's spirited."

She choked a laugh in bitter disbelief. “He never acts out.”

Finding his collar amidst his fur, she gave the dog a tug. Chewie refused to budge. She thought of Detective Dameron and how his comment that Chewie could sometimes resemble Cujo — a horror straight from the pages of a Stephen King novel.

"Almost."

“You’ll want to keep him inside at night. On a lead, if you can — especially if that’s the kind of stunt he’s going to pull. He’s big enough to take off the door.” He muttered, “Damn near just about did.”

She knew that. He’d said as much before.

"Come on," she said to the dog, trying to coax him backward from the field. Some part of her found that the proximity to the crop left her skirting thoughts of shadows and broken limbs, blood painting all that gold in spatters of bright carmine. Such things were easily washed away with a downpour, but the earth remained parched, and the sky scorched to orange when evening fell. On the first night, Rey thought it a curious color, but now she wondered if it didn’t leave the field eerie and oppressive in post-nuclear fallout hues.

“He sat at the window whining all night,” she admitted. “Are there —” she strained, “coyotes, or foxes, or something of that nature in the area?”

Ben didn’t reply.

“You heard what I said, Rey?” he asked instead.

She glared around her arm, huffing with the effort to hold the dog, and did her best to shoot a filthy look behind her. She’d heard, alright. But the cryptic approach wasn’t helping her any.

“Why?”

He didn’t offer an answer.

The effort to drag Chewie back to the property had the mutt whining high in tones that swung her left and right as if he were trying to lead her, his stubborn insistence made somehow worse by the fact that he’d stopped listening to commands altogether, and paid no mind to the fact that for every foot she gained, he reclaimed two.

Loathed to ask Ben for help, the thought crossed her mind more than once.

“Ben?” Rey huffed, straining. A glance at the man revealed that he lingered at lip of the porch that sank into the dirt on the westernmost side of the house. His boots tucked over the lip, jutting out two inches over the dead lawn, his thumbs hooked to his belt loops. While she found a sharpness in his eyes as he fixed his gaze on a spot in the far distance, his chin raised and stare unwavering, a chill stole up her spine to curl around the base of her neck like cold fingers on a dead hand.

With all the insistence of a ghostly wind, it blew her ‘round to the field as leaves and debris raked and rolled over the lawn’s tall grass to disappear into the furrows. Rey shivered, anchored only by Chewie’s bulk where the dog stuck to her leg. A low rumble transferred from his chest to her hip, and she reached for his warm comfort as if the growl was a warning of something other she ought to concern herself with.

Ben had all the bearing of a hawk — his attention keen enough to cut, but when she repeated his name, he didn’t look at her.

“Get him in the house.”

Something in his tone suggested there wasn’t the time to argue.

Rey couldn’t have explained it, but her heart gave a double-tap and chugged into a trot — pattering against her ribs as her breathing thinned. “What?” It fell from her mouth in a puff of air. Something about the rigidity of his frame, stilled to the point of being predatory: dark and sharp and silent, edged with a tension Rey herself couldn’t explain, other than that it scared her into motion when he turned that black gaze onto her.

“Now.”

With another pull, she and Chewie lumbered to a trot, which became a lurch has Rey managed to maneuver him inside, swatting at his backside when he hesitated to lick at Ben’s fingers. He’d turned away when she looked back, his dark eyes narrowed on a point in the distance as if trained on a patch of low-rolling cloud, she thought, now that she stood by him. Ben had a whole two and a half feet at least on her with which to see better, and wrapping her arms around herself, she didn’t wait for him as she ushered Chewbacca into the house.

“Thank you for catching me,” she said, easing into the kitchen and letting the screen door settle behind her.

He said after her, “Sorry for the chair.”

A glance left revealed that she was down to two in the kitchen, as Ben’s fall in the process of saving her from a tumble had annihilated one of the remaining three.

He lingered on the porch, a bastion against the storm that threatened. Though Rey didn’t ask what he saw out there, the hardness in the planes of his face and the taut set of his shoulders kept her from inquiring further, though she couldn’t deny his handsomeness in the moment as the breeze brushed the flaps of his collar and lifted the curls around his ears.

The plush crackle of grass bending as he stepped off the porch made her turn to watch. Chewie’s plaintive whine possessed just a little heartbreak, but not so much that she didn’t leave a hand on the screen door’s handle. He flung himself at the table for leverage, giving Ben a “Ruff!” of encouragement as the man walked towards the field. Rey couldn’t explain why, but her heart offered a double-pound and began hammering, as if beyond that wall of broken gold, something rode out among the wind-driven currents across the grain as if to meet him.

Ben stopped at the edge where the grass broke onto earth, his gaze thrown far ahead to something Rey herself couldn’t see. Even pressed against the screen, she strained — searching for whatever it was out there that lifted the downy-soft hair on her skin, turning the air electric with the possibility of lightning.

Worry blossomed, unbidden. It was too quiet. Too watchful to be so still.

She thought of calling out to him, but the sound caught in her throat.

Standing against the corn, Ben remained a smear of black: a notch if ichor and shadow that pulled at some primal part of her, reminding her on some deeper level that it might’ve been better to lock the doors against whatever waited out there. He lifted a hand, fingers outstretched and trailing gently along the stalks as he walked the row. Like he knew it well. As if he was greeting it after a time spent away.

Rey couldn’t say why it felt as if the world held its breath.

She couldn’t make more than a choked sound of protest at how close he stood to the field.

She would not be able to say why her fear rose sharp and acrid, and with a swiftness that made her temples pound and palms slick the screen where she pressed her hands into rusted metal.

Something uncanny in his features remained when he turned back, head down and contemplative as he closed and locked the door. It was a further moment before his attention returned to her, a lingering imperiousness setting his jaw as he lumbered across the lawn.

“Rey,” he said, a lilt of surprise in the greeting, as if noticing how intently she watched him.

She didn’t blush this time, and she didn’t ask what was out there.

_Feldgeister_, Snoke had said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously, Obi-Wan. What the fuck? 
> 
> Thank you for reading, for the nice comments, for the reblogs and recs. If you want to get updated on [Tumblr](http://octobertown.tumblr.com), just hit me up over there and I'll ping you when I update. 
> 
> If you're reading FDS and I've ruined literally everything for you because of that last chapter, and/or it made you cry, know that I love you and I'm getting ready to wrap things up over the next couple of weeks. It'll be okay. It's not darkfic, just a dark night of the soul. 
> 
> Yours,
> 
> An unrepentant murderer of characters, octobertown


	10. Cellar Door

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay. We got our furbaby this weekend and he's a little beast. We're learning how to nap in-between trying to tire him out playing fetch and learning things like "Come here, Mochi!" and "Mochi, you can't eat that!" and "Mochi, those are daddy's slippers!" 
> 
> For the first time in days, I've managed to sit down with my laptop while he naps a bit and get some work done. So without further ado: _Cellar Door_.

Sometime past two, an hour after Ben had opted to walk home despite the threat of rain, Rey and Chewie split sandwiches in a clean kitchen. Rather, Rey split her sandwich with herself, slurping at an iced tea that came out of a glass bottle and tasted a little like plastic, and eyed a freshly-scoured fridge scented with chemicals. She left the small windows open to let the room air out; the world outside gloomy and oppressive with the promise of rain.

Ben’s expertise with cleaning products was such that he might’ve served as an excellent butcher in a past life — or maybe part of a clean-up outfit called in by the mob for particularly dreadful jobs. Not a drop of deer blood remained, and frankly, the whole room now smelled like a hospital.

She doubted she’d ever use the Frigidaire for food, but the gesture left a rueful smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.

He’d stripped the newspaper clippings to reveal unstained wallpaper from the sixties, putting them in a shoebox for later review. Rey imagined that even after scouring, he couldn’t quite kill the scent of the deer head. It might’ve been a fair shade better than the rest of the place, but _eau de Javex _would still give her a migraine if she lingered.

She ate her lunch at the table on one of the remaining two chairs with a grim stubbornness, facing the back windows with frequent glances to the field behind the house. Some part of her wanted to keep an eye on the corn in case something revealed itself.

“_Feldgeister_,” she muttered to the dog. Googling it proved impossible given the lack of cellular signal. She almost said it again, but some latent recollection of those old horror movies from her childhood gave her pause — _Blood Mary_. _Candyman_. Sometimes saying a thing’s name a few times proved enough of a summons to exercise caution.

Ben’s rapt attention on the field stirred something in her; his air of commanding an undisputed catalyst for contemplation that left her wondering about him and his relationship with Snoke.

It gave rise to several images in her mind’s eye that rose the hair on the backs of her arms, so many so that she found herself scrubbing away the unease and rolling down her sleeves as if to hide it:

Combine blades and corn, scarred skin and broken stalks. Obi-Wan dead and naked out in the west field, a trail of his blood wetting the ground like rain, feeding the thirsty earth. A child-aged Ben staring down at the mangled body of his dead father. Snoke’s hand on Ben’s shoulder, possessive, and Ben — so different when he was alone with her:

A feeling of kindredness so new and tender she couldn’t quite figure out what to make of it.

She glanced back to the empty walls of the kitchen, absent the death record of hundreds of anonymous Jane and John Does, now that Ben had taken pains to remove them. He hadn’t needed to say anything about the small gesture of kindness. She hadn’t needed to tell him that it hurt her to think that Obi-Wan believed them dead and gone, when that was the very thing that made her stomach ache when she thought on the possibility too long.

The whole of the day ground together into a grist that sat between her skin and her clothes, leaving her feeling raw and a little exposed.

The field remained, untended and overgrown. Waiting.

To claim that it didn’t feel as if something lingered there, staring back into the house as she stared into it, would be a lie. It wasn’t that Rey could see its eyes, but she felt its unrelenting attention as if it only waited for her to let down her guard. She shivered.

Somewhere in the house, a clock continued ticking.

“There are no such thing as ghosts,” she informed Chewie, but part of her imagination remained dubious, even while he thumped his tail against the linoleum. She pulled a tin of chocolate pudding from a plastic grocery bag, and outfitted with a plastic spoon, licked the lid anyway.

Spending lunch watching the wall of gold at the back of the house hadn’t revealed any clues as to what Ben had been so studiously considering, and the longer she stared, the more likely it seemed that if there was something out in the corn, it wasn’t about to cross the border to the lawn. Chewie made no further complaints, and Rey wrote his break for freedom off as a spurt of willful abandon. He might’ve been an old dog, but he had the heart of an adventurer — a remnant, perhaps, of his youth in the time before he’d become her loyal, adopted sidekick.

When the acrid tang of bleach become too much, finally, Rey ushered Chewie into the dining room, blockading the door with a few boxes to deter the dog, just in case. She opened both screens to the outside world, letting a cross-draft through the first floor.

The wind came up on a southeaster, blowing through the front hall and lifting the tattered curtains from the windows. An unseasonable warmth came in with the fresh hint of ozone and the sweet, powdery scent of farmers in far off fields harvesting their grain. Even with no one around for miles, she could scent the mud and diesel of farm machinery; neighbours preparing to cull back their yields for the harvest, she supposed. It was silent, but even under that steely sky, she found the daytime quiet a comfort.

Walking the rooms at ground level revealed that they’d actually managed to press back some of the oppressive clutter, but a glance p the stairs at the door that remained locked and shuttered to her made her want to march back to the barn and find something to break down the door.

She swallowed her irritation. Turned back to her intended task, trying to cultivate patience.

He’d be back with tools for the job. There was no reason for her to start swinging axes just yet.

Patience. Yes. She was well-acquainted with that particular virtue.

Ben’s assistance had helped clear the dining room, the kitchen, and the parlour, giving her access to two closets and the crawl space beneath the stairs. The latter hadn’t been used for several years, though the preserves stuffed away inside it kept the company of spiders. She left the door ajar to air out the musty scent of trapped air.

Chewie took up his vigil once more in the corner of the parlour, sniffing the blanket for something familiar as Rey dragged ten loads to the dumpster, her arms beginning to scream from the effort of lifting and tossing. She rubbed her shoulders more with each pass, certain that she’d feel the ache in her back tomorrow, and wondering if the rust-crusted claw-footed tub upstairs might spout water clear enough to bathe with. She wasn’t fussy, but if it was like the kitchen, she suspected it would gush brown and smell of pipes laid sometime at the beginning of the century — a sure beck and call to whatever underworld lurked beneath the furrows, because the scent of country water reminded her decidedly of sulfur.

Progress slowed as mid-afternoon came and went, leaving large swaths of floor in the parlour to be swept clear of debris. She found pine floors stretching from end to end of the house, knobby and knotted in places, and in need of a good mop and polish. Mouse bones beneath the couch. Old crumbs. Candy wrappers and old tissues. A sock missing its match caused her to contemplate when she’d find the strength to investigate Obi-Wan’s bedroom and drawers, but she turned her gaze inward where it felt safer to contemplate the smaller artifacts of his life, trying to better understand the man through his possessions without a narrator to explain the why’s and wherefores of his liquor cabinet crammed with empty bottles, or the shelf with the shoebox of chipped Wedgewood china pieces.

The closets on the first floor contained coats packed with camphor, the tang following her as she stripped them from their hangers and draped them over the side of the porch railing. Hard strawberry candy lined the pockets, years-stale.

This inventory of the man’s life painted a curious picture, because the deeper into Obi-Wan’s past she dug, the more cohesive the landscape became:

The books she found in the closet possessed an order to them she didn’t recognize. It seemed as if two lives spent years in this house — the first layer of crazy blanketed a much more ordered symmetry of belongings: the small library of bent-spines and dog-eared pages, she found in the scullery pantry, for example. Why it was there, she couldn’t fathom, but she paused beneath the bare bulb, letting the amber glow light the titles, her fingers grazing them with delicate reverence.

Rey thought of Ben, then: the whisper of his aftershave lingering in the air, here, though she hadn’t thought he’d ventured this far into the kitchen while he cleaned. Maybe it was the memory of him, but she stopped at _Faust_, wondering why he’d named those particular titles for her:

_Frankenstein. Dracula. Carmilla. The Picture of Dorian Grey. Madame Bovary. Paradise Lost._

She frowned.

Monsters, all of them: a litany of the fallen.

Obi-Wan’s library held relics from a different age: Shakespeare and Marlowe’s tragedies notched between individual copies of the _Divine Comedy_. _The Art of War_. _War and Peace_. _The Alchemist. Pillars of the Earth._ But also, curiouser, a battered copy of _German Folklore and Traditions_ with the cover dangling by a thread. Well-loved.

“You liked to read,” she said with reverence to a man who couldn’t hear her appreciation, and when she closed the door on the small literary shrine, she did so with a newfound respect for who he might’ve been. In her hand, she carried a copy of the strangest book of them all, because it contained pictures, and bore the words on the yellow and black cover, “Who watches the Watchmen?”

In her childhood, books held a sacred and special otherness to them that kept them just out of reach for most of her young life. Luxuries like libraries in the Jakku desert were hard to come by; she’d found her first comic book jammed into one of the cockpits in the aerial graveyard out in the desert. Rey didn’t recognize Alan Moore at all, but she knew tights and capes when she saw them, and moreover, she couldn’t resist the brightly-coloured figures.

The door shut with a click, and she slipped back into the parlour, which was altogether too formal a name for the sunken couch and laz-y-boy with its loose springs sitting lonesome and dilapidated in the corner. The rug remained at the centre of the room, and she wiped her upper lip, putting down the graphic novel on the low coffee table that sat on cinderblocks.

With the floor mostly cleared, Chewie took the liberty to sniff at the corners, finding further rodent bones and droppings, no doubt. Too tired to stop him, she considered dragging a box of loose papers to the couch to begin the arduous process of sifting through them to find anything of value, when the guttering sound of claws scraping wood snapped her attention left. His nose to the floor, Chewie pawed at the macrame rug, claws clicking to the hardwood as he snuffled, lifting it at the edge.

“What’ve you got there?” she asked.

When Chewie didn’t lift his head, burrowing his nose farther under the rug and between the slats, Rey approached. Crouching beside him, she flipped the rug over, half-expecting the body of a cat pancaked beneath, but instead, the found the edge of a door.

A beat passed, her heart knocking against her ribcage as the litany of possibilities sped past.

Shit, Rey thought, her heart starting to drum against her ribs.

“Come on.” Frowning, she patted Chewie’s side, urging him to shuffle over as she dragged the table away. Given the state of her arms, she all but shoved the cinderblocks off to the side, and flipped the rug off to reveal a fair-sized root cellar door cut into the hardwood.

Her shoulders sagged, and crouched with her elbows on her knees, she looked to her dog with flagging hope. It figured that there would be a basement — a hidden one at that. Just like a secret, blocked off bloody door on the second level. She almost tittered. Pointed at the trap door.

“That’s where he kept the bodies.”

For his part, Chewbacca didn’t appreciate the joke. Her skin prickled with goosebumps, her words waning and turning sour. Their echo of made her hesitate, and knowing that she was going to go down there in a moment, she wished she hadn’t uttered them at all.

“Right. Ten points from Gryffindor for being stupid,” she muttered.

Brushing at the latch, she weighed her options:

Spend the afternoon on a moth-eaten couch reading a comic book, or —

She heaved a breath, notched her fingers under the pull, and gave it a yank. It lifted three inches with a guttural groan, and Rey leapt backwards, startled by the sound. It slammed back into place, dust heaving out every side.

Sniffing, Chewie padded forwards, and gave her a questioning look as if to ask what she was playing at. He ruffed, wagging his tail as if encouraging her to do it again. As if this were a game that ended with her body forgotten beneath Kenobi House — a literal return to her roots.

Her heart felt as if it were a caged thing attempting to claw its way from his chest.

“I’ve seen the type of guarding you do, guard dog. It’s not bloody good.”

He licked his nose, pawing at the floor.

“Yes, I know. You found the thing. Good boy,” she told him flatly.

He barked at either her or the door, or both. She couldn’t be sure.

Rolling the carpet back completely, Rey eyed it with her hands on her hips, running through a silent series of rationalizations meant to stop her palms from sweating over the various possibilities that lay beneath the floor:

“It’s probably a root cellar,” she informed Chewie. “It’s a little like a fridge, where homesteaders would keep their potatoes and onions and preserves over the winter. Dig a hole in the ground where it’s cooler, and stack crates of food in there. Funny place for it.”

Middle of the living room. It ought to have been in the kitchen. The scullery, maybe.

She frowned, snapping at Chewie to heed her instead of pawing at the trap door.

The hinges had been replaced not too long ago, as their shine suggested they were newer than the house, but the latch had a hook and eye better suited for a padlock.

She tossed Chewie a biscuit, which he snapped out of the air.

“What’s the worst thing we find?” she asked him, scratching behind his ears. “Rotting food?” she suggested. “Hoodoo room?” she said a little lower with a frown. She wasn’t ruling out the possibility of bodies.

By rights, had there been something under the house that was worth being concerned about, Obi-Wan would have locked it up and chained it. He would have bricked it over and mortared it. Put it behind a false wall.

She blew out a breath.

“Right.”

Instead, he’d hidden it in plain sight.

She lifted the hatch an inch, stale grey darkness greeting her. The air was cooler, but had the mildewy softness of water damage that hit the back of her throat. She scrunched her nose, hauling it the rest of the way open and setting the door on the floor.

Chewie barked again, causing Rey to grit her teeth against the sudden, ridiculous desire to rip the little scrap of paper off the kitchen wall and call Ben back so that she wouldn’t have to face the dank crawl space by herself. Suppressing the urge was harder than she’d expected, the longer she lingered, peering down into the six-foot drop outfitted with a rickety wood staircase that might’ve been installed a century before she’d even been born.

A short drop and a misplaced step, and she’d snap an ankle, but the square of light from the parlour lit at least a little of what appeared to be an old fashioned cellar, and nothing more.

“It’ll be fine,” she told her dog. “But you’re going to stay up here.”

She ought to have dug up a flashlight, but curiosity urged her down the first three rungs, ducking down to peer into the space as soft grey as darkness enveloped her. Nothing snatched at her ankles. Nothing moved. Taking her last breath of clean air, she descended below ground completely.

She stood on hard-pack a moment, letting her eyes adjust as shelves resolved in the gloom around her. A few large barrels stacked the nearest wall, wood crates with empty bottles scattered around them. The floor remained unfinished, the walls made from the stacked stone foundations of the house. Someone had obviously dug the space out an age ago, and left very few possessions behind. It seemed that it hadn’t been in use for several years, either, judging by the layer of dust on the few sparse items she could discern.

Chewie stuck his head over the door, panting down over her head. She squinted up as dust tricked down from the movements of his paws, raining on her face and making her squint.

“Yes, you’ve proved yourself useful,” she told him. “But I can’t see anything if you block my light, you big furball,” she said affectionately.

Still holding onto the ladder, Rey backed up a foot, the brush of something cold and slick trickling across the juncture where her neck and shoulders remained exposed by the scoop of her teeshirt.

She gasped, her hand flying for it, heart slamming into her ribs as she jumped forward and spun. Her heel caught on the ladder, and she snapped a hand out before she could topple. Grey shadows curtained the back part of the room, but nothing lingered — nothing reached for her at all. Rey righted herself, finding the offending article that she’d brushed up against — a swinging cord connected to a bare bulb. It swayed a little from being disturbed.

Heart jackhammering, she scrubbed one-handed at the lingering sensation on her skin, reaching for and giving the cord a yank with her free hand.

It clicked on with a rattling snap, and to her surprise, the light cast a dull amber circle into the gloom: revealing a large room of descending height that sat somewhere between a crawl space and actual basement. A wood table and two chairs sat cobwebbed and abandoned in the centre of the space, but that wasn’t the interesting thing — it was the collection of bottles lining the walls; some empty, but many full and dust-covered: a motley collection of various sizes and shapes, following no uniformity but giving the impression of a make-do prohibition distillery. She even found some sealed mason jars, and a few milk jugs among them.

Stranger still were the bathtubs: three old claw-footed affairs with a collection of fixtures and pipe works sat neglected against the farthest wall. She approached them, standing with ease despite the low ceiling’s declining drop because of the uneven floor. A few bottles remained scattered on an overturned crate nearby, one with its funnel still attached.

She picked up a dust-covered jug — a heavy thing without a label, and rubbed off some of the grit.

Liquid sloshed inside it.

“I’ll be damned,” she said to herself, her voice muffled by the thick air.

She checked the table, finding a newspaper dated to 1980, and beneath that, a small green book marked with the chewed nub of a pencil.

Overhead, she heard Chewie’s padding footsteps as he crossed the parlour, and his low snorting as he pressed his nose to the floor, tracking her progress — his presence more a comfort than she’d admit to anyone.

“Good dog,” she said to the beams and joinery overhead, finding nails extruding from the exposed wood. “I’m still here,” she told him through the floor.

Beneath her feet, she found the impressions of other footprints — different sizes and shoes. More than just one individual passed through here, using the space to whatever nefarious ends this cellar might’ve been used for. It occurred to her that at least one set of prints belonged to her grandfather, and for a moment it felt to her as if he were standing right beside her.

Rey shivered, feeling invasive all of a sudden, as if she were trespassing.

He wasn’t of course. She was utterly alone, and in the muffled silence, she hardly heard Chewbacca upstairs.

She set the bottle down on the table, angling herself towards the light to see better the forgotten artifacts on the table as she flipped open the ledger to trail a finger down the pencilled entries it contained.

So many red marks. Debts, she realized: someone’s accounts left unsettled.

It didn’t take a genius to sort it out either:

“Moonshine,” she whispered.

Obi-Wan had been a bloody bootlegger.

Chewie offered a plaintive whine, snagging at her attention. She heard him stir, the floorboards groaning with his weight as he moved around, circling the room above.

No wonder he’d kept to himself: he’d ran an entire operation from his home on the sly, and doubtless, he’d gotten into trouble for it along the lines — if not financially, then likely with a bad batch of the stuff. She snorted, wondering if some of his product hadn’t been responsible for his mental deterioration. She’d heard enough stories about what a high enough alcohol content might do to a person: if the liquor could strip paint off tin siding, or clean a car engine of a decade’s worth of grease, it wasn’t hard to imagine the ease at which enough shots might scramble a person’s brain cells.

Judging by the state of the cellar, he’d left it all behind, covering it up in a hurry and never bothering to hide the evidence.

She didn’t have long to contemplate the possibility, however, as Chewie gave one sharp, deafening bark that echoed down into the cellar with such a ferocity that Rey nearly smacked her head into a low-settled beam.

Swearing, her voice drowned out by the rapid trot of heavy paws as Chewie shuttled from the parlour across the room over her head, each step as loud as a gunshot. She snatched the ledger, turning to bolt for it as she recalled his earlier jaunt through the screen door — and how she’d mistakenly thought that tossing the a few boxes in front of the door as a blockade would work to keep him contained.

His barking became thunderous, each step a hammering, deafening assault as he scrabbled from one end of the parlour, about-faced, and pounded his way towards the front hall. Too stunned to move, Rey clamped the ledger to her head. Chewie was halfway across the house already by the time she’d turned back to the ladder, and she scrambled towards it, hoping she might catch him before he broke through her makeshift retaining wall.

A shadow passed over the trap door — sending the rectangle of daylight dripping into the basement to darkness, and then to light again.

She paused with a foot midair.

Rey wheezed a breath, knowing there was no window in the parlour that would create a shift like that — and none too subtle, she grew uncertain of what she’d seen, doubting herself even as her heart chugged into a steady trot that became a hearty pounding against her ribs as, overhead, she heard the barest creak of a floorboard under the din of Chewie’s barking.

She’d stopped moving, just the same, staring upwards as if expecting the sound to come again, not sure she’d heard it at all under the din.

Across the house, she could hear Chewbacca roaring bark, his thundering run banking from the dining room to the hall again, thumping before the kitchen. The sound of the makeshift blockade buckling under Chewbacca’s assault smashed into the foundations, sending dust drifting from the spot in trickles near where she stood.

It carried the subtlety of a single foot step — weight transferred from heel to toe. Rey’s head snapped up, her breathing turning ragged as she tried to make sense of it.

Chewie’s barking continued, his front paws now lifting and slamming back into the floor across the house like a hammer in the cellar’s crawl space, the corn field behind the house once again drawing his attention.

Rey held her breath, staring overhead, and seeing for the first time that between the slats of flooring the subtle shift and play of light as someone lingered — the shape and shadow only a blob of form in the parlour that rocked backwards, sending pirouettes of dust into her eyes. Tinnitus turned to a whine in her ears, the low throb of her hammering heart making it hard to breathe as she tried to cobble together some understanding from the pieces of information her eyes strained for — maybe it was the laz-y-boy, she thought to herself, her teeth clenched together as she fought not to move, frozen where she was, her heart thundering.

The shadow shifted, and Rey had the distinct impression that whoever it was also sought her out through the floor: a game of cat and mouse.

Someone was in the house.

She gasped, and the blot of shadow darted left to where she could not see, nor follow.

This time, the footsteps had the swiftness of purpose behind them as they ran, and Rey gave chase, shouting for Chewbacca as she threw herself at the ladder, scrambling as her toe snapped off the wood. Her shin barked against the ladder, the pain registering a moment later in her haste, and she threw herself at it and up, collecting splinters along the way. Across the house, Chewie offered a singular noise of surprise — his deafening complaints going unheeded and echoing through the chambered darkness of the cellar.

Scrabbling to her feet, Rey skidded from the parlour into the hall, clipping her shoulder and seeing the door to the crawlspace beneath the stairs swaying as if brushed as someone passed. The box blockade to the kitchen remained, though as she approached, it seemed as if a few of them sat askew from where she’d left them. Beyond it, the door to the kitchen remained open, and the screen door beyond slapping the house’s siding in the wind. It lifted tendrils of her sticking hair, and cooled the sweat on her brow. She shivered just the same, finding the cover of the ledger she’d stolen from the basement still in hand and smeared with stains from her sweat.

Catching her breath, she approached the back door, looking for signs that something had been disturbed, Chewie’s barking turned frantic, the front door taking the brunt of his assault.

“Okay,” she told him, her voice tiny in the din. She cleared her throat, and stopped herself from trying again — the possibility that someone lingered in hiding too much a possibility to announce herself.

She slipped through the dining room and kitchen, pushing aside boxes and seeing no indicator that anyone had been through the house save Ben and herself; the marks of their passing readily apparent in the dirt and dust that coated everything. She opened the closets and pantry, and peered beneath the ugly table cloth in the dining room just in case. The decision to draw a weapon for herself came and went with fleeting swiftness. A baseball bat would be a better option to a knife, or a pipe, even. Something that would at least put her diminutive stature out of reach of any attacker. Knives meant she needed to be close to grasping hands and swinging fists. Rey set the cleaver back into the drawer, trying to settle her breathing.

Chewbacca resorted to growling at nothing on the front lawn, his vigil leaving his nose against the screen and huffing from the effort. His tongue lolled, pink and wet, his expression dour and worn.

That he hadn’t knocked the door off its hinges might’ve been a blessing, but her heart thrummed hard against her ribs, the worry that he might try it again too close to the surface to leave him by himself. She pulled him back by his collar, tapping her thigh with the command to follow. He did, for which she was grateful as she locked the doors, looking to the fields as the descending evening with newly revived suspicion.

“Come on,” she directed him quietly. He made for a better weapon anyway. Better than any blade or bat.

She eyed the stairs, Chewie panting at her side and smelling like an over-excited, over-heated old man.

Gesturing for him to be silent, they ascended as a team to the second floor, where Rey eased open every door, closet, and peered beneath the beds with the knowledge that she wouldn’t sleep through the night if she didn’t.

Her breathing only returned to normal as night fell, the sky burnished pink, then red, then the colour of a fresh bruise beyond the windows. With the thought of work a distant thing that nagged at her, adrenaline gave way to hollow relief, and she sat for a heavy moment on the edge of her bed with Chewie pressed against her leg, staring at the field and the slow roil of the wind across miles of corn. It was minutes before she felt as if she could breathe normally again, and a while longer before she willingly let herself downstairs to turn on the lights.

They remained alone, but the feeling of unrest remained mingled in her exhaustion.

She looked at her dog, rubbing circles with her thumb on the spot of his forehead that he enjoyed, taking comfort in his warmth and bulk as the tiredness made her limbs heavy, and returned to the parlour with its gaping black maw bleeding its musty darkness into the room. Hesitating only a moment, Rey thought of the fields surrounding her, and how the dirt beneath the house was the same dirt of the fields, and no matter how she locked the doors and windows against it, it remained a presence that surrounded her, waiting and watchful.

She closed the trapdoor over it, resettled the macrame rug, and replaced each cinderblock supporting the table atop it, ensuring that it was weighted down, and that — despite her unease — there would be no further surprises raised from the soil beneath Kenobi House save for what she’d found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep wondering if I should cite my references and inspo as I'm going because a lot of the editing process means rediscovery. In this chapter, even though there isn't an alien for miles, I remember very clearly thinking of _Signs_ while I was working on the cellar piece (because this isn't a firsthand experience I would ever willfully subject myself to are you crazy) and the inspiration always comes from somewhere. There's also a hint of _Blair Witch_ in here. Maybe even a bit of _The Conjuring_. Definitely a little _Cabin in the Woods_ (let's all be grateful it's a ledger and not a conch shell that Rey picks up?)
> 
> I've mentioned in the comments that I am not and never have been a rural kid. I grew up in the suburbs and then moved to a (huge) metropolitan area later for a decade before moving back to the burbs again to "settle down". I have, however, managed to marry a guy from the midwest who (even though he has zero interest in reading anything Reylo-related) has been hugely supportive of this story and has let me pick his brain for the good stuff. I give him my thanks for answering my questions about "Drowning in grain silos -- is that a thing?" and "What's with the cinderblocks supporting cars missing their wheels?" and him randomly going, while we're driving somewhere, "Did you mention guns? You should mention guns if you want it to be authentic. Even if it's like, gunshots in the distance from peoples shooting cans." 
> 
> It was our one-year anniversary on the 23rd. I'd like to dedicate this chapter to him. Thanks Tibbers, you da best.


	11. Cry the neck

The ledger remained on the kitchen table where she’d tossed it, and pacing in the dimming kitchen, light limning to dusk from the windows, she eyed it with wary curiosity. Lingering in the kitchen, besides, left her in proximity to the number thumbtacked to the wall beside the phone, scrawled in black and in the rough-hewn script of someone who didn’t often use a pen.

She didn’t mind. A little bit of Ben’s handwriting, even if it was just his phone number, felt like a talisman for luck and good fortune. It offered a comfort she hadn’t expected, warming her where her sweat had cooled damp on her clothes, leaving her cold and craving a knitted sweater she hadn’t retrieved from her backpack when she’d been upstairs.

Still, she lingered, wrestling with the desire to pick up the phone and make use of the invitation to call him.

How would she explain this?

She’d found a moonshine cellar in the basement, with a leger of old dates and numbers that clearly indicated the sort of trouble Obiwan had gotten involved in, and the nagging suspicion that somehow bad business dealings had played a role in his death. It was a flittering, nagging reminder that Ben was a perfect stranger, and that telling him she thought someone else had stood in her house while she was in the crawl space investigating made it seem like she was completely off her nut. _That_ particular thought flapped around her ears, demanding she pay attention before she did something stupid.

Why she’d rather call him instead of the dashing Detective Dameron, or even Mayor Organa herself, was the real mystery. She knew that at some point she’d need to inform the authorities of her findings, that it might even be prudent to report the strange noises in Kenobi House she’d mistaken for a trespasser, but so near dark, her thoughts were of Ben and the long shadows he wore like a mantle. It seemed that the gloaming was better suited for his company, and the grosgrain of his voice was a temptation she couldn’t place.

She leapt when the phone rang of its own accord, the sound shrill and biting in the quiet. It took her a further moment to hop across the kitchen and pick it off the cradle.

“Hello?”

The mouthpiece smelled like someone else’s breath, and drawing back, she frowned at the unfamiliarity of it.

The cord tangled in spirals that knotted and looped — distending like entrails as she tried to right them, only becoming more tangled.

“Hello?” she said again, frowning at the tether, and not understanding why Obiwan hadn’t bothered installing a wireless in the place of this relic from another age.

The line crackled in response, and Rey stopped, straining, the earpiece pressed to her head.

“Is anyone there?”

Breathing on the other end of the line, she was certain of it.

Bristling, she strained against the quiet, struggling to hear anything that might suggest one of the village idiots were trying to prank her.

The caller sucked in a breath, managing a strangled, “Rey.” He swallowed. Cleared his throat.

Her heart did a double-pitter-patter-somersault at the familiarity of that single syllable, warm as hot chocolate and as comforting.

Her response might’ve been more breathy than she’d have cared for, but she managed a, “Hi,” in return.

She thought she heard Ben smile on the other end of the line. “I had this feeling --“ he began, even though she’d said nothing to warrant that uncanny synchronicity between them. “I had this feeling that you were walking over my grave.”

“Charmer.” It was out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

She heard the beat in his pause; slightly longer than comfortable, as if the sarcasm was too biting for his raw honesty.

Rey opened her mouth to say something further, and stopped herself from making more of a mess of the situation. She rolled her eyes, pushing her fingers into her hair and giving the roots a yank. Idiot, she called herself.

Rey exhaled, spilling the confession in a rush, “I was just thinking about calling you when the phone rang.”

She waited, the seconds ticking long and slow, turning into a painful ache waiting for his response. Why was this so awkward? Why did it feel as if their shared candor of the afternoon turned weighted as the sky darkened, the nature of their exchange somehow more intimate for the distance and the darkness between them. Rey chewed her lip, fingers wrapping the phone wire.

“Ah.” Something loaded in that one word: satisfaction, perhaps. Relief. “That explains it.”

“I didn’t take you to be the superstitious type.” She’d thought that was only Snoke.

He chuckled, the sound turning into a purr she felt in her chest. Rey leaned against the wall, curling into herself as if to nurture the sound as it sank into her belly, warming her.

“Folk customs and superstition aren’t one and the same. It’s an expression, better regarded as a compliment more than anything.”

She dragged her teeth over her lip, biting back a smile of her own. “That I was thinking of you?”

“Yes. And I you.”

She found that it wasn’t entirely an unwelcome feeling, to know that his thoughts had drifted to her, out there, wherever Ben was. She glanced at his note: Sarini Hollow.

“Is everything alright?” he asked.

Sobering, Rey thought of telling him about the cellar — about the feeling of being watched. A glance at the back window revealed only her reflection in the glass of the window panes, the field beyond obscured to darkness. She wished there were lights pointing onto the field, but she suspected a trip to the hardware store and a willingness to blow the last of her pay check might remedy that.

“I’m fine,” she said, and slanted a glance toward the kitchen table where Obiwan’s moonshine ledger and its numerous debts remained. Debts and names — a whole history of trafficked contraband. “I was just thinking of doing a little light reading before bed.”

“Did you find something of interest?” he asked.

Something stopped her from telling Ben about the book, the cellar, or the incident when she was down there. It would have been a fair shade more difficult trying to explain her weariness from the day, rather than that she thought she was chasing the ghosts that wandered through her house.

Yes, with the threat of insanity there were bright spots: for example, late night calls just to check in when the sun went down. Perhaps that was a symptom of Kenobi House — the swarthiest of Junari Point’s residents took interest when you inevitably placed yourself in a position of mortal peril.

“Something like that.”

“I was thinking about the bedroom,” he said.

A beat, and Rey cleared her throat, a flurry of sense impressions not quite congealed into images warmed her belly.

“I’ve asked around, and I’ve managed to get my hands on a few tools if you wanted to take a crack at it tomorrow.”

_The_ bedroom. Not _her_ bedroom. The prickle of heat in her cheeks tingled.

He hesitated. “I can’t make any promises. It might just be easier to cut a hole in the wall beside the door if you’re really intent on getting in there.”

The door itself was a mess. She got it.

“Right.”

“Rey,” he began, hesitating. “Can I ask you a question?”

Her heartbeat took the opportunity to skip again, and leaning against the wall as her knees juddered, threatening to drop her altogether at the prospect, she weighed that any question warranting permission to ask another question left few possibilities: a narrow spectrum for what might be asked at all.

She forced casual, her palms slicked with perspiration as she realized he was going to ask her out — the implication wove into his cadence; the forced lightness of it. She was _sure_.

“Yes?”

“I had this thought that I couldn’t shake — the Falcon? Where did you get it?”

An embarrassed flush bloomed in her cheeks, scalding its way down her neck and settling across her collarbone.

Grateful that Ben couldn’t see her, Rey pressed two fingers to her temple, and did her best to shake off the guttering, high-pitched tenor to her voice when she stuttered, “O-oh, the Falcon? I borrowed it from my boss out in Junari. He deals in junk, primarily. It’s a — It’s a hot trade out in the desert.”

Where unbar Plutt had got it from… She wouldn’t have been surprised had he stolen it himself.

Disappointment pinched sharp and swift below her sternum. She forced a smile, noting how easily she managed the fib, all things considered. Her cheeks burned, and when she touched them, they scorched her fingers like fever.

Idiot, she said to herself again.

She thumped her head back against the wall.

Ben’s prolonged silence forced her to shift, fidgeting. Rey cleared her throat, resuming an increasingly violent pinching/unpinching of the phone cord as she tried to push aside the scooped feeling in her chest; as if the brief lift and sudden dip into disappointment didn’t leave her feeling strangely lonely.

“Right,” he said at last, but something felt off in his exhale. Like he wanted to say something further, but changed his mind against it.

Rey pinched her mouth into a hard line.

She had no expectations from Ben Solo. Honestly, she told herself, she wouldn’t have known what to say had he asked —

Did she even want to spend more time with him? Snoke had taken pains to force them together that afternoon, and though Ben had sought her out to return the rope she’d dropped the day prior, she hadn’t thought the desire to see him again or speak to him would have felt so strong. She never did that sort of thing — she never looked for it; never needed the company beyond Chewie.

Rey thumbed the cord, their ongoing silence turning awkward the longer neither of them said anything.

“Well, I --“ she began, too brightly.

“So --“ he said at the same time.

“Sorry --“ she said.

“You first.”

She sucked in a lungful of air, rolling her gaze to the ceiling, and doing best not to punch herself in the face for being a fool.

“Thanks for checking up,” she said.

His voice was tight. “Right. It was no trouble.”

Something still felt off to her, like he wanted to say something more, or that he wanted to ask something else of her just to hear her speak.

“I should go,” she said.

Ben’s disappointment dragged the whole of his tone two octaves lower. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

A soft huff. “You weren’t.”

“I just wanted to make sure you were doing alright out there.”

She glanced at his number on the wall, hedging her bets, “I didn’t want to disturb you,” she admitted. “That’s why I didn’t call.”

“I would’ve appreciated the interruption.”

She let that hang a moment.

“But, if you don’t mind my saying, if you weren’t picking up the phone because you feel it might be best to limit your time around me, I understand. My reputation is — not inconsiderable. I don’t want to overstep,” he continued. “I’m sorry if --“ He stopped himself.

“What?”

“I apologize if I scared you.” The finality of the statement made it seem as if it was something he’d thought about — long and hard.

Her eyes burned, and she couldn’t explain why but the flush that heated her face became a glow of warmth towards him.

“You didn’t.” She swallowed. “And I don’t think you would. There’s something in you, Ben.” She frowned, her brow furrowing. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel like you’re a worse judge and jury towards yourself than you deserve.”

He huffed a laugh.

“You think you know me, Rey.”

She smiled into her chest, hugging herself. “No, but I might like to.”

The pause between them waxed and, edged with a strangled sort of surprise, Ben sniffed a smile into the phone.

“I might like that.”

A warmth towards him that she didn’t recognize spread through her chest.

“Good night, Rey,” he said, the smile lingering in a way that she imagined might reach his eyes. And what stars glittered there in the darkness, she wondered —

Having never had anyone call just to see how she was doing left her chewing her thumbnail, meandering the kitchen a time after she’d hung up the phone. She shut the windows, flipped the latches, and made sure that the lock on the door was securely bolted before rousing Chewie from his dog-nap in the parlour.

The front of the house received a similar treatment of checks before she ascended to bed, the ledger under one arm, and thoughts of Ben Solo trailing her with fragile, gossamer hopes.

—

Dry stalks brushed her palms as she slipped between the rows, crossing between the furrows as the house behind her sped into the dusk, the sky like fire with the sunset trapped in the clouds. The world glowed gold and yellow, desiccated leaves soundless beneath her feet as Rey moved forward barefoot without feeling the snapped spines of so many stalks. They littered the ground like bones.

The world behind her fell away, and turning, she found that there was only the labyrinthine paths into the field before her, and that the pitched roof of Kenobi House was mere afterthought — a dream within a dream, under a sky stained as if with blood.

The air was cold on her bare arms, a breeze lifting the simple shift she wore as if it were little more than a spiderweb. Though she wished to shelter herself against it, the press of the wind bowed the corn around her like a sea of gold and white. She stood rooted, uncertain what to do, as if seeing the corn stalks as subjects awaiting her passage, but feeling that they were mistaken, somehow:

She was unworthy of their reverence.

She was no queen.

She took a breath, tasting ash on her tongue, and felt the weight of another’s attention though the field wished to swallow her.

_Go right_. The thought rose like a long-ago memory from a story — a fable or myth, perhaps, when confronted with a maze: if you wanted to leave, then you ought to chose a single direction, turning with the same choice over and over to eventually find your way out, lest you find yourself more lost than when you started.

But she didn’t really want to leave, did she?

The thought left her confused. It felt as if she was right where she ought to have been, all along. She only hoped herself worthy of —

A crackling from her left caused her to turn, searching for the source of the sound, but the wall of corn rose three feet over her head and left her dwarfed and shifting to see between the irregular gaps in the plants.

The paths around her changed, resolving into new patterns that pointed through to shadows beyond. The possibility of what lingered there spurred her onward.

Steps quickening, Rey found herself running — corn silk clinging to her bare skin as she flew through the field, and no longer impervious, she saw the marks made by her feet on the soil as whatever loomed behind her crashed right, sending her sprinting in the opposite direction than she’d thought she’d wanted.

Bloodied footprints trailed her, the soil swallowing every drop.

The crash of shadow into earth heaved the ground beneath her feet, the furrow walks shuddering with the impact. Though she couldn’t see it, she heard whatever it was as it followed — as it herded her, as if she were part of its wild hunt; the doe that was offered.

The stalks of plants lashed at her, and though her legs and arms pumped as hard as they could, she strained to keep herself from turning as the sound rising first became apparent:

The crackle and snap of severed grain, stalks snapping with a ferocity as they were cleaved low.

In the distance, voices cried, “The neck! The neck!”

Terror spread cold through her chest, the pain in her feet sudden as she stumbled, lurching onward as the darkness resolved behind her into the shape of the creature that pursued her:

Larger than life, and swinging a scythe, severing crop from the field with swift and certain deftness without remorse and without pity.

Rey looked over her shoulder only once, seeing not the eyes of the monster that followed, but only the blade.

She saw not the field anymore, but bodies cut low — men and women fleeing that certain edge just as surely as she did, mouths stretched in terror; their screams a quiet hush as comforting as the rustle of the grain. If she listened hard enough, the sound became a roar.

Under that red sky, those eyes turned on her — a familiarity and despair choking as her steps stumbled, her ankles catching, sending her into the waiting embrace of the earth that would close over her head and swallow her as she struck.

The ground was thirsty.

The wind was dead.

The scythe cut a path toward her that promised silence and cold and dark.

_The neck! The neck!_

—

Rey shot upright in the dark, clawing at her throat. Sweat-slicked and beading in rivulets from her hair, she found her skin clammy and cold, the bedsheets soaked.

Around her, shadows swelled. The bedroom remained still and silent, save for Chewie’s snoring at the foot of the bed where she’d thrown his blanket. She could see the rise and fall of his bulk, a shadow meant to comfort despite the laboured efforts of his breathing.

She sank to her elbows, then shifted, trying to extract herself from the damp patch.

She thrust off the sheets, kicking them towards her feet, and eased back to her side with her pounding heart and her shuddering limbs, certain that the pieces of the dream were a portent somehow: certain that she’d seen it before. That she knew what it meant. It’s familiarity sat with a heavy keenness that squeezed the air from her chest, making each inhalation a wheeze that took extra negotiation the more she tried to separate herself from her panic.

It wasn’t real, she rationalized, though she might’ve felt the cold glide of steel against her skin, and the lingering occultation of the figure’s shadow turned the world cold and dark as he bore down upon her.

Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, but the thought of getting out of bed and padding down to the darkened lower level of the house where she’d be nearest the corn field was anathema.

Her fingers shook as she pressed them to her mouth, so she fisted them, trying to summon whatever power she’d carried into her adult life from her nightmares as a girl, alone in Jakku:

Exhale through the nose. Inhale through the mouth.

She fixed her gaze on the shapes of furniture in her room, trying to re-anchor herself to reality. The dream clung to her as steadfast as corn silk; the thought making her shudder. Rey rubbed the feeling from her arms until only goosebumps remained.

Blinking into the dark, she stared through to the window, grateful that from where she lay she couldn’t see the corn. She couldn’t rightly say why, but she rolled the dream over in her mind, she thought of Obi-Wan — surely some of the details offered by Leia about his death had stuck and clung to her: the bare feet, the blood, the field.

Staring at that square of black paned glass did nothing to settle her nerves, her heart hammering like some jagged, caged thing intent on pointing out the pains in her body now that she was awake. The beside clock read half two. There were no stars.

“Chewie,” she hissed into the dark, but the dog didn’t stir, and the reality of inviting him onto her bed for the additional security meant she might wind up sleeping on the floor.

His snoring continued, but beneath the sound, Rey thought she caught a whisper of something in the depths of the house. She lifted her head off the pillow long enough to let both ears strain, but it didn’t come again. She flipped the pillow, punched it, and shifted the sheet over her shoulder in a long-misplaced gesture from childhood that required the back of her neck to be covered no matter how hot she got. Something about leaving even an inch of exposed skin to the shadows of this strange house out in the middle of nowhere inspired prudence, though when the nightmares came to claim her again, she suspected it would do little good.

She kicked off the sheet again, flopped onto her back, and from outside, she heard it again:

_Sweetheart_.

Fisting her hands into the sheet, she lay there, staring at the window trying to hold her breath, wondering if she did, would her ears continue playing tricks.

Just the wind, she told herself.

Sweetheart. No one that she could recall had ever used such a term of endearment for her.

A soft voice — a man’s she felt she ought to know but didn’t recognize. It dredged some part of her distant memories in a way that wanted to scrape the bedrock of her acknowledgement.

_I’ll come back, sweetheart._

Not from inside the house, she recognized.

Heart hammering, she sucked in a breath, and held it as she waited for the voice to slither through the window panes and the darkness, and arrive with all the subtle persuasion of a whisper laid directly in her ear.

Was she still dreaming?

It had to be in her head; the result of a day’s worth of stress and tragedy forcing some compartmentalized bit of her early childhood traumas to run rampant. Still, she didn’t get up to check out the window.

Chewie continued snoring.

_I’ll come back, sweetheart. I promise._

Rey shut her eyes against the dark, her temples beginning to pound from the stress of it, fear settling in to settle as a lingering, acrid pall over the darkened bedroom. Kenobi House creaked and shifted around her, its old bones voicing their soft complaints without being disturbed by the lives inside it — only those, seemingly, outdoors.

“It’s not real,” she hissed at herself, squeezing her eyes shut so hard spots flecked the inside of her lids.

The voices couldn’t belong to anyone she knew, not really — not even as the next drew her name into a stretching syllable that brushed over her with the gentleness of a mother’s touch.

_Rey_.

She shivered, snatching for the other pillow, and clamped it over her head so that in the suffocating stillness, she might not hear any of those voices on the field, beckoning her to come and see for herself what dreams and nightmares lingered there.

No, she didn’t know them. But some part of her recalled with creeping hysteria that some voices were memories meant only to be recognized in the soul. Crushing the pillow to the reverberating echo in her head, Rey curled into herself, recalling imaginings that felt a little like this in the hollows of her memory:

If anyone could have suggested it, she might’ve believed the voices on the field to be those of her parents, calling her.

\--

She awoke to a slat of burnished sunlight falling across her face. Squinting at the clock, she realized why: a quarter passed eleven and she’d nearly slept half the day.

She’d tossed both pillows, having turned in a counterclockwise half-circle, and found herself bent at an odd angle to occupy the edge of the bed where the sheets hadn’t dried from her night sweats. The sheets tangled at her waist, and her body ached with the overtired hum of her nightmares.

Chewie must have failed to wake her for his morning walk — the dog’s desperation usually rousing her before seven most days, his demands for food preventing her from returning to bed.

When Rey sat up, scrubbing the sleep from her eyes, she found his blanket empty and the door to the bedroom standing ajar.

“Chewie?” she called, her voice hoarse. She cleared her throat, disentangling herself from the sheets, and padded into the hall with a wary glance at the corn field through the window.

The night’s memories dragged at her heels, leaving her faltering as she paused, looking harder into the waves of corn caught by the roll of wind. The lawn remained undisturbed, the stalks unbroken save for the line that led into the west field. She could see it better now from her higher vantage point — a jagged line running from the yard and criss-crossing into the distance where a patch of corn had been flattened into the earth. It was darker than the rest, the corn broken and trampled, revealing the earth below like a black stain.

She shivered, her partial view of the field obscured as she dragged a sweatshirt from the foot of the bed, pulling on her sneakers without socks as she checked to see if there was any indicator of trespassing the night before.

Certain she’d been awake for most of the night, the voices mere echoes that called to her from the field, she saw no evidence of what she’d feared the most: a little girl’s nightmare painted in shadow and blood, the dead lingering outside the house, beckoning to her to join them in the field.

“Chewie?” she called again, silence returning to her.

Somewhere, a clock continued ticking. She bristled against it, taking the stairs at a trot and feeling the cold curl of the wind as it sped through the first floor. It smelled of burning leaves and raw, overturned earth.

Turning the corner, Rey found the source:

The backdoor of the house stood open and swaying, though she remembered locking it the night before. She’d snapped the bolt in place to hold it, she was sure — or at least, that’s what she told herself as she approached it, calling again for her dog, her tone turning shrill.

“Chewie!”

His food bowl sat empty by the fridge. Snatching it up, Rey overfilled it with kibble, thought better of it, and shook some out. She dragged the cup scoop with her, hoping that the rattle of his food against metal would be enough of a draw to bring him back from wherever he’d run off to.

Don’t let him off his lead, Ben had warned her. Make sure to keep him in the house.

Her heart thudded, a cold wash of nerves quickening her steps as she shouldered her way onto the back porch, the boards creaking under her steps.

She’d closed the door. She’d locked it. She knew she had.

“Chewie!” Her voice cracked. She jiggled the food in its bowl, panic prickling her limbs with numbness. Where was he? “Breakfast, Chewie!”

At ground level, she could see better the wall of corn and its imperfections, the furrow walks vanishing into a tangle of unkempt pathways after only a few feet. She marched out halfway, shaking Chewie’s bowl, her eyes skipping over so much desiccated uniformity that at first she missed it altogether.

The bowl fell with a clatter, spilling kibble across the lawn and into the tall grass.

She thrashed forward, stumbling, the flattened parts of dead greenery giving way to gravel and earth, and then shreds where the grass lay flattened and stained in a long, hard line that led into the field — not so far from the original site where the impervious wall had been breached by her grandfather in his maddened flight.

She stopped feet before it, her stomach heaving as she retched at the broken entry point where so many plants had been bent and broken in an obvious struggle. Stains darkened the earth.

“Chewie!” Rey screamed into the corn, her voice echoing and tinny — lost to the field.

Dangling from one broken corn stalk, his collar clung in halves. A split shredded the rayon, leaving the dog bone—shaped tag to dangle. She snatched at it, stopping before the wall of corn, and squeezing it so hard that it bruised her palm.

Smears of ochre painted the corn, and unable to bring herself to touch it, she knew what it was by smell alone:

Pennies. A metallic tang hung on the air, roughened by the scent of moistened earth where the parched soil swallowed the blood before she might discover where the trail led into the field. Her heart squeezed in pain, her eyes burning and then blurring as the world swam before her, the corn breathing in invitation — whispers in the night echoed in her ears, begging her to venture out to greet them; to come home as if she were the one that was lost.

Chewbacca must have heard those voices too.

He must have answered.

“_Chewie!_”

How long had he been gone?

Her legs shuddered, the muscles demanding that she choose: run after him, or run away. A rustle in the grain in the field far to her left caught her attention. More than the wind, she heard the crackle of stalks breaking as if thrust apart by something that passed amongst the furrows.

Rey sucked in a breath, staggering back a step, and then left to better track it.

Heart pounding, she clutched the small scrap of metal with his name on it to her chest, feeling the slamming rhythm of her panic as it drove her towards the sound.

“Chewie?”

No barking. No snarls. Not a whimper of pain.

The movement stopped, the corn falling still.

She waited, her limbs sluggish and weak, the disorientation from the lack of sleep and her driving panic keeping her tethered. The corn swayed, languid and graceful, and shrivelled from the lack of rain. Its sigh was the whisper of paper sheaves, rustling together in hushed conference.

It seemed to sigh.

_Feldgeister_.

The word rose to the forefront of her mind: a warning offered with a sly smile and a laugh, as if superstition could make her a fool. Folklore. Cautionary tales.

The crash from the field pushed her back a step as the movement began again, this time, turning in an arc that carved its way towards her with an insistent onward march that shook the earth.

Rey fell back a step, and then another when it became apparent that it was not her dog that approached.

She couldn’t see its form, nor its face, but the smell —

Rey turned and ran. Legs pumping, she threw herself into the house, smashing the door behind her with only a single glance spared at the field through the window.

She bolted, knowing with all certain that whatever pursued her had dragged her dog off in the night — but that wasn’t the worst of it.

She snatched her keys, flying from the front porch and onto the dirt drive. Her ankles shuddered with the impact, the searing feeling rocketing up her shins and settling in her knees. Launching herself into the Falcon’s driver seat, Rey slammed the door after herself — nearly on her own leg. She slapped the lock down, jammed the key in the ignition, and forced the gear shift into drive despite a grinding sound of automotive pain when she punched the clutch.

“No no no no no —” she heard herself saying, as if from far away.

The engine stammered, threatening her with its age and exhaustion.

“Come on!”

A grinding noise filled her ears, the field to her left whipping under a wind that didn’t bank against the car.

She’d burn out the alternator if she kept it up. Old car. Old reliable. She almost laughed, but it was tinged with hysteria.

Finally, mercifully, the engine turned over, coughing to a throaty start that turned into a purr. Gunning it, she smashed her heel to the floor of the cab, kicking up dirt and rock behind her as she fled Kenobi House, her lungs choked with pain and panic, Chewie’s dog tag pressed into the steering wheel beneath her hand.

She didn’t look back as she tore down the lane, a thought chasing her all the way. It lingered like an onion skin on her grief, ready to be peeled back to reveal further layers of what had happened the night before.

Tears cut hot lines down her face. She barely felt them under the numbing softness of panic turning into shock:

She didn’t know how long Chewie had been missing. She didn’t know if he’d woken before her, or how he’d slipped out of the house — she didn’t know if someone had opened the door and beckoned him out there onto the field. But something unnatural remained in the knowledge that she’d thought he’d been at her feet, last night:

She didn’t know how long that door had stood open to the field.

And she didn’t know what had come into her bedroom, and curled up on the floor in Chewie’s place before her bed as she slept, waking only to hear it breathe.


	12. Sarini Hollow

Heaving down enormous breaths, she hugged the wheel, taking each bump from the road to the chest as she followed the line of trees flanking the southernmost edge of Junari Point, searching for the inlet and the bridge — some marker that would confirm she was heading the right way.

Panic made it hard to breathe, her hands slipping off the wheel from her sweat the harder she gripped it.

Ben said that he lived past the creek, and that’s what she clung to: an anchor against the feeling that the grain flanking both sides of the road hid things she didn’t want to see, even as she passed from one low barbed-wire fence to the fields of wheat and hay and soy that buffered the Kenobi property, she couldn’t help keep checking the rearview, searching for something she felt but couldn’t see.

A shadow in the corn, the ripple of a presence breaking the stalks in its pursuit.

The front wheel hit a ditch, knocking her senses along with her teeth.

She swore, cutting the wheel left before she lost control of the car. The road ahead veered right, and she crossed the lanes without signalling and without checking her blinds. Thankful that no one else was around, she passed an overgrown sign that someone had painted, finding herself under the shadow of a small thicket of gnarled trees whose leaves littered the ground.

Sarini Hollow was hardly more than a row of dilapidated trailers whose lawns had parched grey and brown. She passed a car set on cinderblocks on a front lawn, its wheels missing. Slowing the Falcon, Rey stared at wooden boards replacing glass windows, strewn assortments of dirty toys left to the elements on front lawns, and sagging roofs where the supports had failed the enduring nature of the people that called this place home. The red pips of shotgun shells peppered the next lawn like confetti. Whether by conviction or happenstance, Ben lived here.

An echoing ringing that had begun in her ears since leaving Kenobi House intensified the longer she lingered, trying to glean some understanding why anyone would choose this for themselves — and more, where she might find him in this place.

A screen door banged behind her and Rey jerked as if it were a gunshot.

She hit the gas, chewing her lip, and bumped around the bend, the feeling of attentive gazes following her a portent she couldn’t shake. In one window, the flimsy polyester of a curtain fell back into place.

Her heart continued thrumming its staccato, her knee jiggling before the clutch.

“Come on,” she said to herself, the sound muffled by the cottony feeling in her ears that signalled an oncoming faint.

Her fingers tingled with numbness.

She shook her head, denying what she’d seen — what she’d heard in the field. She denied that Chewie was missing. She rejected everything that had happened so far that morning, and her heart gave a leap as she spotted Ben’s truck three doors down, crouched between the flanking trees like a dark beast.

She didn’t even register what his house looked like as it became a blur of wood siding the color of silt.

She was out the door and staggering across the lawn, the engine guttering, keys forgotten, as Ben stepped out onto the front porch.

She registered the strip of skin down his front from an unbuttoned shirt, and the grim surprise that twisted his mouth as he wiped his hands on a dish rag that he dropped at her approach.

Knees giving out, she stumbled into him, reaching as she babbled, “I didn’t know where else to go —”

The ground swelled beneath her feet — not because it was moving, but because her legs had given way, and she was sinking to her knees. Catching herself on her knees, she braced for the spots dotting her vision to swallow her entirely, but the press of Ben’s fingers, light on her shoulders, bought her mere moments.

“You drove like this,” he said, a simmering undercurrent of anger turning the words menacing. She flinched, unable to help herself. He was right of course — she shouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel, but there was something in the field.

There had been something in her house.

She shook her head, trying to shake off the lightheadedness. “You don’t understand.”

Chewie —

Blinking back tears, she clutched her knees, her vision redoubling as she focused on her feet. She gripped his torn collar like a lifeline, the tag jangling.

Her white canvas sneakers had taken the brunt of the house’s filth the day prior, but new stains painted the shoes.

“I stepped in it,” she whispered, her eyes blurring as she stared down at the toes of her chucks. Dark smears notched into the rubber, a streak of red over the toes of her shoes.

“Rey.”

She barely heard him, the sound in her ears turning into a roar.

“There’s blood on my shoes,” she heard herself say, her voice coming from far away. “I think it’s Chewie’s.”

Warm, strong hands wrapped her above the arms, over her elbows. The smell of him filled her mouth: spice and musk and smoke, and she choked on it, sound cutting off in her throat as the world darkened as if by eclipse, her mouth turning cottony in a way that she felt fizzling through her sinus cavity.

She didn’t have time to warn him as the faint stole over her, forcing her to the edge of a precipice where her head hummed with the sound of whirring insect wings; her sight eclipsed with mutli-colored spots that dragged her down to darkness as she felt her feet swept from under her.

Her head rolled on her neck, air rushing into her lugs moments later as the sky came into view overhead, and then the wood-slatted roof of a gallery. Darkness ebbed.

A cold sweat prickled over her forehead as light tunnelled through once more.

The drop ceiling was water stained.

A face swam into view, and distantly, Rey thought once more that she might be dreaming.

Ben looked down on her, the wall of flannel at her cheek an anchor that brought her back to reality by increments.

“You fainted.”

She felt the cool wash of sweat as the spell passed, numbness abating as the blood flow to her head restarted. The flannel of his shirt against her cheek was… nice. Warm. His heart thundered in her ear.

“You caught me.”

He didn’t smile. “Better than hitting your head.”

He carried her, her feet knocking gently together as she shouldered through a door into a dim room, depositing her safe on a plaid couch that might’ve been someone’s leisure suit in the seventies. It must have been a good hunt. She sank into its cushioning, swallowed by its wear and softness — its size meant for someone much larger than her.

Her head throbbed, a headache blooming behind her eyes.

“I’ll get you some orange juice in a minute. You need sugar.” The rumble of his voice possessed the soothing notes of hot chocolate, but it was the gentleness of his touch as he unlaced her sneakers, his thumb cupping the curve of her ankle through her sock that softened her.

It began as a frown — just a crinkling of her chin as the muscles of her face tightened, freezing into a rictus of pain that she felt clear to her chest. It punched the air from her lungs, making it seem as if her heart would seize from the effort of trying to hold it in check. If she let go, even for a moment, it felt like it might rip her heart from her chest.

_Chewie is gone_, she thought, but she couldn’t tell him that. She couldn’t say it out loud.

Ben worked the knot in her laces free, pulling her shoes off carefully from the heel and setting her feet on the couch as he stood. Vague sensorial impressions remained — the feeling of her calves set on his thighs, the touch of long fingers through her jeans. The rustle and click-shut noises of a blanket being pulled from a drawer somewhere and the added weight on her legs swept over her like a hug.

_Chewie is gone_.

When she sucked down a breath, it spilled out a sob.

Ben didn’t tell her it would be okay. He offered no platitudes or assurances, and he didn’t press her for what had happened. When her eyes fluttered and she stole a glance, she saw only that he carried her shoes from the room — brought off somewhere that she wouldn’t need to see the evidence for herself of what had happened.

When he returned moments later, Rey remained in the same place, her fists pressing into her eyes as if to hold the feelings in awhile longer.

The couch dipped at her side where he sat at the edge, waiting. The thunk of a glass on the floor beside her a hollow, but reassuring familiarity.

She shook her head, her lip trembling.

“I need you to tell me,” he said quietly.

The ache in her chest redoubled, squeezing her heart in a familiar vice of loss and longing that she knew, if she released it for a moment, it would all break apart on her — everything she’d worked for, everything she’d built for herself. This careful facsimile of normality constructed with patience and a yearning so deep to have some slice of ordinary for herself: a mother, a father, a family. Chewie was her lifeline and anchor.

“He’s all I have.” The words shredded between her teeth, delivered in a pitch so strained it was a miracle he’d heard her at all, and Rey didn’t care.

She didn’t give a shit about anything.

Not without Chewie.

She couldn’t tell him, and Ben didn’t ask again. Not yet.

“Did you go into the corn?” he asked her.

She shook her head, soundless, her breath hiccuping in small bursts as the world washed in tears. She couldn’t see Ben’s face as he pressed the glass into her hand.

“Drink.”

She didn’t want to.

“Your blood sugar’s low. That’s why you blacked out. This will help.”

Her stomach roiled.

“Please.”

The word shuddered through her, lighting a fresh wave of pain that raked over her nerves. Blinking up at him, the world cleared for just a moment: this man sat with her, concern marking his face, a blaze in his eyes that should have made her want to shrink into the cushions. Yet, there was more there: a simple earnestness that knew pain like hers, and didn’t shy from it.

She clasped the glass, took a sip. Sweet and cold, like it had been in the refrigerator. No pulp. It tasted like ash on her tongue, and knowing this, she pressed it back towards him.

“Did you go into the corn, Rey?” he asked again, this time with new concern edging his tone.

She didn’t understand, and with her muddled incomprehension, took a moment of eyeing the question from every unsympathetic angle that she could before something finally snapped, and she realized, what bloody difference did it make anyway?

“No,” she sobbed. “No, I did not go into the _fucking_ corn.”

But whatever was in the corn had gotten Chewie.

She roared in pain and frustration — a soundless wail of pain that had her curling her legs to her chest, bunching the knot of sickness and hurt into her centre.

“He’s gone,” she sobbed. “He’s hurt or he’s —”

The word ‘dead’ caught behind her teeth.

Ben pulled a handkerchief from somewhere, and placing it with deliberate care into her hand, he rose, though she thought for a moment she might feel the warming press of his fingers again — soothing, enormous, and surprisingly gentle.

“I’m going to turn off your car,” he told her. “Get the keys out before someone decides it might be better picked over and sold for scrap.”

She turned her face into the couch cushion, clutching the small scrap of linen to her mouth. Nodded.

“Have you eaten?”

She didn’t want to. Shook her head anyway.

He got off the couch, floorboards creaking as if to punctuate his heavy steps with newfound ferocity as he eased from the house, and from outside, she heard him swear loudly enough to make her start.

Her lungs ached, but she gulped air, sitting upright fully as the curse was accompanied by the clang of metal siding being hit.

The Falcon’s engine shut off, and when Ben returned, she watched him cross the room — trying to hide his left hand until he was out of sight, but Rey saw the blood on his knuckles. Saw the broken skin.

The muscles in her stomach quaked, but he returned to her, not bothering to keep it secret as he sat at her feet with an archaic tin first aid kit that clicked open with the flip of a latch.

Owlish and far too dazed, she swatted at her face, pushing away tears.

He’d hit something outside in his frustration, and Ben’s hands continued to shake as he looked to the bandages for some solution that wasn’t immediately presented.

Tears tracked her cheeks, but sitting there watching him as his rage bubbled beneath the surface, making his fingers shake, she couldn’t help herself from reaching over, pulling it from him. It was instinctive, some part of her finding the negative space between them should have been filled — if not with words, then with care.

Pulling the kit from him, she scooted towards him, indicating that he ought to present those trembling digits if he wanted to be bandaged.

“There’s iodine,” he muttered, and Rey shook her head.

Sniffing, she wiped at her face. He’d warned her, hadn’t he? Right from the very beginning.

“Masochist,” Rey said instead, dodging the tumble of panicked, fluttering thoughts that beat at her: Ben’s warnings. Snoke trying to scare her. The whispers in her sleep. Her dreams.

She shuddered, unwilling to search his face for the possibility that he knew what was out there — that every crazy possibility might be rooted in some far-fetched truth.

Studiously, Rey diverted her attention to his knuckles.

Ben huffed a hollow laugh, though the tremor in his hand didn’t abate.

“Hold still.”

He flinched at the alcohol swab, but save for a little lift in the skin, she outfitted him with gauze and tape and an ointment of some sort that had been an essential player a number of times before. The squeeze tube was pockmarked and pitted from use.

Working on his hand was the distraction she needed, and in a tremulous voice, she told him what had transpired over the course of the night, and what she found in the morning against the crop.

He stared at her as she worked, and longer even when she stopped speaking, settling her own hands in her lap. They sat within inches of each other, so close that with any shift or movement, she could hear the fabric of his shirt raze over his skin. She could smell the soap he’d used that morning.

“I didn’t go after him.” Her voice cracked, and she stopped. “I should have --“

“No. You did the right thing coming here.”

“You don’t understand, I wasn’t afraid until I saw the blood —“

“Fear is the most basic regulator we have. It tells us when we need to run, and when we need to hide.”

She turned away. The problem was that she wasn’t sure what she was hiding from, and to admit that there was nothing in the field to be afraid of — that she was imagining things chasing her all the way out to Sarini Hollow; imagining things coming into her house at night?

She shook her head, an internal denial of whatever bubbling crazy she was formulating through sleep deprivation and stress.

“You’re spending too much time in the house alone,” he said. “That place drove Obiwan crazy to begin with — too much isolation, too much to tend all that land by himself. It’s so quiet that you imagine yourself hearing things, out on the field.”

“Just the wind,” she said in a small voice.

Ben sducked so that he was directly in her line of sight. Dark eyes filled her vision, an intent sharpness as penetrating as a knife making her shrink backwards.

This wasn’t just fervour, she thought: this was the sort of madness she’d thought she’d only find in Ben’s mentor, Snoke.

“He claimed he saw things, Rey — out on the field. In the corn. Claimed they called to him in the night, promising him things that only he could know. Voices of his children. Voices of his wife. Voices of the —”

“Stop,” she managed, with what little breath was left from the choking, oppressive compression in her chest. Her heart squeezed, the swoon threatening again. Her pulse beat in her temples, and she wiped her palms down her pant legs, pushing off the thin blanket that he’d covered her with to comfort her.

“You’d be be better off sleeping on this couch, if it came to it.”

There was a firmness to it — a finality that left her bristling.

“I didn’t lock the door properly,” she said, uncertain if it was at all true. She thought she had. “Chewie snuck out. He’s been drawn to that field since we got here. He probably hurt himself, got nicked on a piece of refuse in the house, or—”

“Rey.”

“He’s not dead,” she said, proud of how she could hold his stare, convincing herself that it was possible — that it could be true.

When Ben pulled his lower lip into his mouth, it became apparent that he wanted to withhold whatever it was that churned in his gaze by doing so. He raised his eyebrows in a gesture that said he thought her full of shit, but didn’t want to tell her that she was lying to herself.

Her lip quivered, but she stopped it.

“He can’t be dead,” she insisted, but it lacked conviction.

He nodded. “Okay.”

As if that were enough. Stopping that damnable trembling in her lip was one thing, but with further tears threatening, she turned away, pulling her knees up to her chin and hugging her legs to her chest.

She wiped her nose on her knee.

_Feldgeister_.

She shook her head, trying to clear it of the word — Snoke’s laughter echoing, hollow and fetid in her mind.

He’d obviously succeeded in scaring her, preying on her insecurities and leaving enough of a suggestion for her to doubt herself. The nightmares she could live with, the ridiculous possibility that there was actually something in the corn field capable of stealing her dog away in the middle of the night? That was truly bonkers.

A wolf, maybe. A bear, more likely. He might’ve been gored by a stag or attacked by coyotes. Chewie was a large animal, but not so big that other predators couldn’t harm him. He was old, besides.

She needed to call the police. She’d tell Leia and Poe Dameron, and she’d have them raid the field as a bloody team. They’d done it before, and no one had said there was anything at all hiding in wait — some fiend in the furrows ready to lure her into its clutches, leaving her a smear on the ground.

“I need to go,” she said, ready to stand.

Ben appeared startled for only a moment.

“I need to find him. I’m sure Chewie’s out there, right now — this was stupid, I shouldn’t have come —”

“Wait.”

“I need to —” she began kicking off the blanket. “He’s hurt and I left him --“

“Rey, you can’t.“

She shook her head, tangling her feet, shuttling backwards with a sound of pain. “He can’t be —”

“Obiwan said he saw things too,” he shot at her, his voice loud in the small living room. A furtive look skirted his features, fear blooming sudden and wild in his eyes.

Her heart hammered.

“It starts with voices, and the condition escalates. There’s a scientific explanation for the hallucinations — something that happens with farmers and field hands exposed to the elements for too long. Sometimes it’s heat stroke. Sometimes it’s fever. People hear the horror stories of those suffering from delusions, and the legends trip together, becoming something like folklore.” He stopped, searching her face, checking to see if she believed him. He exhaled heavily. Wiped his face, covering his mouth as he turned away from her. The explanation rang hollow, not settling as it should.

Her stomach turned as she realized there was certainly some truth to it, but if Ben lied, he was doing it to make her feel better.

Her heart jackhammered, her ribs bouncing with it.

She settled back into the couch, not trusting her legs to hold her if she stood. “There’s something out there,” she whispered, more of a question that couldn’t have an answer she wanted to hear.

The truth of it lingered in his gaze, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t agree with her. Doing so meant they were both mad.

Ben believed her, she realized — there was something out there on the field.

Ben believed her, she realized — because Ben believed there was something out there on the field.

Rey swallowed the lump in her throat, the futility of repressing the crazy notion that even if she did go out there searching for her dog, she might not like what she found.

“You knew him. Obiwan. Tell me about him.”

Ben exhaled, sinking back into the couch and folding his arms around himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose in a gesture of weary defeat, then fisted the hand against his mouth.

“You shouldn’t hear this from me.”

She cut a sharp glance at him. “You’re willing enough to warn me off my own land, but you won’t tell me why. You’re willing to tell me that he lost his mind out there, but you won’t tell me how.” She worried her lip.

Her voice broke. “Chewie --“ she began, and stopped herself. “When I woke this morning the backdoor was open, thought I was sure I locked it last night. There was a trail in the grass leading from the middle of the lawn into the corn. There was blood.” Tears spilled hot down her cheeks. “I need to know what you know about my grandfather’s time in the house. I need to know what happened to him. I _know_ that something happened to him out there.”

His adam’s apple bobbed as he searched for words, yielding only a little, “Obiwan didn’t get along with the folks in town.”

A muscle ticked in his jaw, and Ben turned away, holding something back.

“How, Ben? _Please_.”

Obiwan kept to himself enough to run an illegal moonshine operation out of his basement. Rey did her best not to snort aloud when he refused her anything further.

The struggle that played over his features as he opened his mouth to say more, then choosing otherwise, was like watching a window shuttered in the face of an oncoming storm. Ben’s armaments locked away the strain in his forehead, smoothing every line of frustration into placid neutrality: it made for a careful composition that only strained at the edges. He wanted to say more. She knew he did, and yet, he stopped himself. But why?

“The less you know about Junari Point, the better off you’ll be.”

A stealthy dark obscured his expression as he began turning from her, as if that was the end of that and he’d offer nothing further. It wasn’t that he was sparing her, she realized — this was Leia’s warning: the people of this town would not be so forthcoming about her grandfather. They would not shed any light on his life here, nor what he was up to out at Kenobi House. Though she’d doubted the mayor’s assurance, it was becoming apparent that Leia had not lied.

A thought bloomed, Snoke’s warnings about the field turning her stomach. The possibility that something had happened to Chewie out there in the corn had not diminished, but armed with the suspicion that Snoke had only tried to scare her off, the pieces began fitting together with more cohesion.

Her stomach flip-flopped at the prospect that someone — not some_thing _as she’d been led to believe — had done something to her dog.

_“Feldgeister_,” she whispered.

Blanching, Ben opened his mouth, but Rey knew exactly why he was being so reticent. She bristled, anger prickling with the glow of fireplace embers that needed blowing-on to ignite.

“You won’t tell me because of Snoke,” she said aloud. “Snoke and his ‘stories.’”

He gave her a warning look, and the suspicion that Ben was protecting his mentor redoubled.

“He has some sort of hold on you. I saw it yesterday when he came by to introduce himself. Whatever that old argument is between him and Obiwan, that’s not you, Ben. I can feel it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

_Liar_, she thought.

A curl of some dark inside joke curling his mouth up at the corner.

It stung that he didn’t trust her enough to tell her, her hope shrivelling with the possibility that she might never find them at all —

Her world narrowed to a fine point, the pressure settling on her shoulders driving her down into the couch, curling onto herself as she shivered, the fight seeping out of her. She worried the edge of the blanket, picking at the frayed threads. She dropped her hands, slapping the blanket back to the couch. Ben had the decency not to flinch.

“I came here so I might know them better,” she said, the words edged and bitter. “I came here to know myself better. I need —“ She sucked in a breath, her eyes burning. “I need to know why they left me behind.”

Wiping her upper lip, she pressed the heel of her hand to the corner of her eye, waiting for the urge to cry to pass.

“I heard them,” she breathed. “Last night — I could hear them calling me. My parents.”

From out there in the field, just like Snoke had said they would.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

“I’ve never felt more alone.”

Remaining still and watchful, motionless as not to disturb while Rey tried to hold it together, pouring her confessions as if he might offer her some absolution, Ben murmured, “You’re not alone.”

She searched his features, finding nothing but bottomless despair in his eyes — a hollow ache that knew aeons for how long that empty solitude stretched. He felt it too. She was sure of it.

Whatever Snoke had done to him — whatever Ben Solo had been brought up to believe — it was no match for her conviction to show him otherwise. There remained a glimmer of hope somewhere between them, a desperation for something more than this place, more than its people — it sat so heavy on him she could see how it turned him small; how it clipped his wings when she was certain he could soar if only he had the right motivation. Not superstitious bullshit. Not cautionary tales about the dark and the fields. Ghost stories. Legends.

She could practically taste his fear; his feelings of insignificance. Powerlessness to do anything different.

What had Snoke made him believe?

“Neither are you,” she whispered, and not knowing how else to show him that it was as much a statement as it was a promise, she unhooked her fingers from the frayed wool and held her hand out to him.

The two feet between them might as well have been a canyon.

He hesitated, looking down at the offering, his jaw working as he considered it like it was so much more than what it was:

Rey wasn’t sure herself. Friendship, perhaps. Empathy. She swallowed the lump in her throat, the possibility that she wasn’t what he wanted chilling her limbs the longer she waited, until finally, terrified by the prospect that he wouldn’t bridge the gap between them, and worried what would happen if he did — Ben raised his hand and pressed the tips of her fingers gently to hers.

Warmth flooded her from the paint of contact, calluses sliding against skin as he flicked that dark gaze up to her, her palm sliding against his in a gesture that was as familiar and foreign and wonderful as anything she’d ever experienced.

It occurred to her that she’d never held another person’s hand before; that the feeling as his fingers slipped around hers with delicate reverence was enough to make her head swim.

Strength in his fingers, and a warmth that she felt slip into her bones, pouring into her in a way that left her tingling. At a distance, she heard herself utter the smallest of gasps, her gaze dropping to his mouth unbidden as he leaned forward.

Time ticked to a slow halt, the air thickening as Rey understood how easily one moment sped into the next, threatening collision as Ben’s hand wrapped her smaller one, his thumb brushing her knuckles in a sweep of sensation she felt all the way down to her toes.

They curled, her socks scrunching as Ben drew her towards him, rising to meet her halfway at an intersecting point where she could feel his breath kiss her lips. Warmth pooled in her belly, her breath catching —

And then the world sped up, crashing in with a violence that left her gasping and tearing away. It felt as if a slice of reality had been peeled back, torn away between them for just a moment as the world bled gold and red and black. Rey saw the corn field in Ben’s eyes: a promise of destruction glinting of the blade of his scythe, mirroring her face in a slivered reflection that redoubled upon her as she struck the floor of his house, not understanding why her nightmare had followed her here — nor why it wore Ben’s face, or why his touch left the scent of blood and ashes on her tongue.

“Rey --“ the confusion in his voice didn’t match the sense impression that lingered as she scrabbled backward, crab-walking until her shoulders struck a low table and she flipped over — slipping into a staggering run that drove her forward and out the door towards the Falcon.

“Rey!” Ben shouted after her, and the nightmare rose to swallow all good sense.

He’d chased her in her dreams, like he chased her now.

Inexplicably, she already knew why:

The ground was thirsty.


	13. Corn Dollie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full disclosure: I live in a part of North America that gets all four seasons, and today was the PERFECT autumn day. Cool, crisp, sunny, and the leaves are changing colour. It's lovely. It puts me in an excellent mood. I was thinking initially that I'd hold off posting another chapter until Sunday or Monday evening, but the season's bit me square on the ass and I've went and decorated for Halloween and _it's the most wonderful time of the year_. So here you go. :)

Shoeless, she chucked herself through the passenger side and slid over the banquette. That Ben had her keys and was stalking towards her with heavy steps, down the porch and over a lawn lacking grass, gave her the opportunity at least to reign in her racketing heart.

She gripped the wheel, her heart pounding.

“Fuck,” she said, her voice loud in the cab.

Standing at the hood, Ben watched her with a frown. He said nothing, his expression carefully arranged to hide any hurts.

He only held her keys out in his hand.

“I can give these to you,” he said. She heard him clearly through the rolled windows and closed doors. “You can leave if you want to.”

She shook her head.

“But you should know you left your shoes too.”

Frowning at her dirty, socked feet, her heart sank a little, her nerves fizzled and snapping at the realization that he’d nearly kissed her, and she’d quite literally bolted.

“I’m sorry,” she said into her chest. He didn’t hear, so she looked up, shook her head, fear making her movements twitch.

Her heart gave a chug of support that flight had been the right idea, but she clearly hadn’t thought it through, and now she was stuck here. At least he wasn’t holding her hostage. Ben didn’t even know what the problem was —

“I’m sorry,” she said again, a little louder. His expression didn’t change.

He placed the keys on the hood of her car.

Knuckles white on the wheel, she didn’t let go for a moment, gnashing on her lower lip. When she next looked up, Ben had retreated to the porch as if she were a scared animal, attempting to defend herself from a larger predator by hiding. She’d almost locked the doors of the car against him.

Feeling all the more stupid for it, she shoved her way out, coming around the side and snatching the keys. She could feel his eyes on her the longer she stood there, hesitating and unsure what to do:

She’d come to him, they’d forged a connection of some sort, and then she’d divested herself of her sanity entirely.

Rey wiped her mouth with a trembling hand, debating.

“Ben?” she asked in the general direction of the house, not looking up.

But it was someone else entirely who replied.

“Ah, Young Rey.”

She spun with a jerk, her hip knocking the sideview out of alignment as Snoke, flanked by his laces, stepped onto the drive.

“What a pleasure it is to see you here.”

Frozen, it took her a moment to force her legs to move. Sticking to the side of the car, she eased back in, giving him a tight smile as she jammed the key into the ignition.

“Mr. Snoke.” She nodded. “I was just leaving.”

She couldn’t help but notice how his gaze drifted to Ben, who remained rooted at a distance, giving her the opportunity to bolt, still. It was not a comfort — the exchange of Snoke’s proximity over Ben’s, regardless of what she’d seen or felt when they’d touched hands.

“What brings you about?” He pressed. “Not too many folk like to venture down to Sarini Hollow. Something about the area makes them skittish.” He bared his teeth in the resemblance of a smile that did nothing to comfort her. “If you don’t mind my saying, you look a little shaken, ma’am. Something stir you up, out there are Kenobi House?”

The engine guttered, chugging its protests as if to complain about her harsh treatment towards it in the last hour. The Falcon possessed the age but not the grace of a machine whose life had been prolonged well past its prime with more than a few repairs and adjustments — Rey’s constant care keeping it running. The abuse she’d doled out when making her escape from Kenobi House might’ve pushed it over the edge this time, a thought that left cold panic spearing her better senses as she struggled with it.

The sound of protest made by the car had the high-pitched whine of a hog going to slaughter, as if Ben’s driveway suddenly became a killing field, and Rey would sacrifice her second oldest friend just to get away.

“That’ll be the alternator,” Snoke supplied helpfully.

She glared, working the inside of her cheek to painful slivers between her teeth as she thrust open the door, skirted by him, and lifted the hood.

The billow of smoke that pooled from the Falcon had the dual ability to make her cough, and shove her heart into her stomach.

Snoke’s laugher was a low, crawling thing that had long lost its legs. The sound spun through her, wrapping her neck and shoulders with the clammy curiosity of an unwelcome touch.

Bristling, she turned back to Ben on the porch, hesitating only long enough to consider begging him for his help, and then thinking better of it as Snoke hemmed her in.

It was at that moment that she noticed what Hux carried with him — a bundle of dark fabric in his arms that he made no effort to hide. Bedding, Rey thought — but who walked around in the middle of the day carrying their sheets?

“Laundromat nearby?” she asked, slanting a glance at him.

“We’re preparing for Harvest Home,” Snoke said, though the unmistakable, uneasy shifting between the two henchmen made her wondering what sort of preparations required laundry. A bit of painted paper mâché peeked from under Hux’s elbow that he was quick to hide. A puppet, Rey though at first — but with another glance she realized she was wrong. Hux carried a mask.

The thin line of his mouth expressed more disdain than displeasure as Rey looked him over, her hackles bristling at their nearness and unyielding interest.

Rey raised her eyebrows as if in challenge.

“Some of the festival requires a little — ah— pageantry,” Snoke supplied. “Some theatrics to enliven the proceedings, you see.”

She chewed it over, a muscle ticking in her jaw the longer she stared. She knew she was wrong before the question even left her lips. “Are you Masons?”

He barked a laugh. “Oh, nothing so secretive — we’re only endeavouring to keep the old customs alive, if only in memory. Without us, without the performance, you see, we’d lose a crucial element that’s so important to this community. Something that not even the folks out in Hanna City can remember, because they’re strayed too far from the path.”

“What’s that?”

She didn’t like his smile. “Tradition.”

From the porch, Ben shifted — the sound was like a shot in the quiet that had Rey turning on instinct.

“Our Hafferkonig —” Snoke began, then corrected himself. “Our _Benjamin_ here has an important role to play in this year’s festival. Came to get him, make sure he’s ready ‘fore the sun sets tonight.”

Ben didn’t offer any acknowledgement, his gaze resting heavy on her even at a distance. Guilt began to eat at her in small morsels, picking away at her conviction that she’d felt and seen something otherworldly at his touch. She shouldn’t have run. She knew that. But her disquiet lingered, leaving echoes of her dream mottled with the reality that he’d been her muse — an exceptionally powerful one — to inspire such a bloody vision.

Before her stood a man whose composure frayed at the edges, furred with black thoughts and the unhealthy influence of circumstance. Doubtless, he wouldn’t wear that same shape of anguish when he looked at her had Snoke’s influence not been so thorough.

Snoke broke into her contemplations. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Rey, you look a little rattled. If it’s not too much an imposition, I might like to ask you a question.”

He sidled closer, and Rey found herself rooted by some force she couldn’t explain: a heaviness in her limbs that crept into her brain, reaching with invisible fingers, probing with the insistence and curiosity of something decayed and hungering.

She shivered, and Ben was beside her, her shoes in hand. He didn’t touch her, for which she couldn’t be certain if she was grateful or not, but his presence stilled the hammering drive of her pulse by increments until she could think clearly again; until the tremor of intrusion receded like the ocean drawing back in preparation for a tsunami.

Snoke smiled, and apart from his stacked teeth and disjointed parts of his skull, she gathered Ben wanted her to handle him in blunt strokes.

“Sure,” she said, feeling more confident than she was. She took back her sneakers, yanking them onto her feet without ceremony.

Between the two men, she couldn’t tell which was worse: the scrutiny, or the shameful weight that felt a little like betrayal.

The brush of Ben’s fingers over the back of her sweater grazed her nerves, and he stopped himself before she could step away. Rey set her mouth in a hard line, bracing for the worst.

She expected him to ask, _Did you hear them out on the field?_

Instead, Snoke surprised her, “What can I do to help?”

It lasted all of a second, abating into slow-rolling suspicion as Snoke’s crooked smile hinted at a leer.

“Chewie escaped the house last night,” she managed, tightly. “I’m not sure there’s much to be done. There aren’t many telephone poles around to post his picture.”

She slammed the car door.

“Curious little fella, is he? Probably went for a wander — caught the scent of a rabbit or some such,” Snoke offered. “He’ll turn up eventually, I’m sure. Dog as big as that’s hard to escape a person’s notice.”

Part of her bristled, fear prickling at the corners of her awareness. A dog Chewie’s size might be mistaken for a wolf, or some other predator if he ventured too close to a farm — someone might think him a threat and try to shoot him.

Dread made quick work of the calm she’d forced upon herself, ripping it into little pieces.

“I’ll put the word out; let people around town know to keep an eye out,” he said. “Meantime, you ought to take your mind off things. Come to the bonfire, tonight — see what Junari Point’s citizens have to offer by way of distraction.” He thrust his chin at Ben, the marred pieces of his flesh straining and making bridges of the thinner scars. It made it seem as if the muscular beneath had healed wrong, somehow. “Benjamin’ll be there, won’t you, son?”

Rey didn’t turn to see Ben’s reaction. She didn’t like the way that Snoke was so easily brushing off Chewie’s disappearance. The dog wasn’t just an animal, not only a pet; he was her companion. Her sidekick. Her co-pilot and best friend.

Suspicion nestled deep, burrowing into the places where she hardened herself against his gaze. In an involuntary gesture, she crossed her arms over her chest as if shielding her body from their collective interest. Hux hung back, tipped against Snoke’s truck, blocking her exit. There remained something oppressive about him — his knowing smirk tipping her off.

At first, she didn’t understand why it bothered her so much, but slowly, Snoke’s tenor and easy offhanded dismissal settled askew: it felt almost as if she ought to consider it all from another angle.

Rey thought of the house — its unlocked door leading to the field. Something Chewie, despite his cleverness and size, could not manage with his paws or nose alone. A man could easily hide in the crop, the corn so tall it would blot out someone even as tall as Ben Solo — he dwarfed her by at least a foot. It wouldn’t take much for a person to lure Chewie outside and into the field.

It wouldn’t take much to surprise him once he was hidden from the house, far enough out that she wouldn’t know what had happened as she slept.

Someone could easily rustle the stalks, crashing towards her while making threatening noises.

Trying to scare her off.

Trying — because the land at Kenobi House was worth a fortune.

And here she was imagining monsters. She felt all the more foolish for it.

“It’s a yearly celebration,” Snoke continued. “No matter the state of the crop, we gather these seven nights leading to the last harvest to remember the hard times when there wasn’t enough to see our humble town through the long, harsh winters. We do it to remember what starvation feels like — to remember what it takes to keep our bellies full and the fires blazing when the darkness comes.” He paused, appearing as if he wanted to say something further.

“Farmers,” Rey hazarded.

“All the folk of Junari Point. Farmers and gatherers, homesteaders and kin — salt of the town.”

She supposed the overwhelming feeling of desolation that seemed to prevalent couldn’t possibly be true. Just because the place appeared a ghost town didn’t mean there weren’t others about: people who worked the lands.

“Harvest looks like it’ll be good this year, too. I can smell it on the wind.” To emphasize his point, he drew in a lungful. All Rey could scent was burnt coffee and cigarette smoke, and distantly, the copper bite of pennies mixed in the soil. She turned her head only slightly, as if catching a hint of something else as the breeze picked up, rolling through the treetops overhead.

“Besides,” he said, clapping Ben on the shoulder with fingers that were more claw and bone for their knobbed joints. “You’ll have fine company. He’s got an important part to play this year, don’t you, son?” His attention never left her face, as if the remark to Ben was only a goad.

Snoke smiled with broken teeth, the gaps in his grin revealing blackened gums — rot from the inside out. A small puff of sweetness and tobacco lingered like a miasma when he leaned in, as if to share a secret with her. “You should come because every king needs a queen,” he said, echoing some sentiment he’d shared before that she hadn’t really registered. He’d said as much before, but Rey thought it has only been a colloquialism — now, she couldn’t be certain.

To his credit, Ben managed to appear uncomfortable. The stiffness in his shoulders and the rigid way he held himself where Snoke’s hand fell off him appeared a visible relief, but he didn’t relax.

A grim set to his mouth left him canting his gaze away from her, the stains beneath his eyes becoming more apparent as weariness appeared to settle over him. She followed his gaze, jerking in surprise at the sound of a door slapping open.

Beyond the row of trailers, an old grist mill sat under a canopy of trees, offset by the shadows of the forest’s overhang. Its ramshackle siding and peeled paint did nothing for the rust color that streaked its front. A bad paint job. It looked a little like old blood.

The sound echoed, preceding the crunch of heavy footfall on gravel. Phasma materialized from the entryway, ducking into the gloomy day with the head of a large, furless animal swinging before her. A long blade dangled from her other hand.

Smears of red stained her apron, and she stopped with an almost guilty look on her face that melted after a moment, her jaw taking on a new firmness as she looked beyond Rey to her master.

If the world had stopped spinning on its axis, threatening to throw her from it, it might’ve been easier than the jarring feeling that she was spinning out of control. Rey registered the ears, a snout, and the brown shag covering the skin, and then the severed line along the neck in jagged shears that dripped and spattered, but it was a moment before she realized the head of the animal in Phasma’s grasp didn’t belong to Rey’s dog.

Her stomach flip-flopped just the same, even as the disparate pieces resolved themselves into the head of a large pig. Any resemblance to Chewbacca was a long-shot at best — the fur bristles too short, the colouring wrong. The size of the head, though — the listless, dangling ears and those staring, brown eyes.

Rey shook herself.

Seeing things.

Her stomach roiled, and she pressed a fist to her mouth, griping the side door of the Falcon and hoping that she’d stay upright instead of blacking out again. She turned away, feeling Ben’s gaze settling heavy on her, the futility of his concern about as good as his nearness. No comforts here.

None whatsoever.

Snoke’s touch raised the hair on the back of her neck. On instinct, she jerked from beneath his fingers, taking a step back to put distance between them: an invisible wall, meant to buffer his presence from her.

Shaken, she managed, “I ought to go.”

“Surely not!” Snoke protested. “You’ve only just arrived.”

Heart hammering, she turned from Phasma’s slow progress towards them, searching for something else onto which she might anchor her gaze. The first thing that swam into view were Ben’s boots, and fearful that she might see the same look in his eyes — that hurt distrust, like she’d somehow done him injury by flying from him in the first place —she shivered.

“Alternator’s fried,” Hux supplied. “Can’t drive that car now. Not gonna get you very far if you try.”

He was right, of course. She felt all the more trapped for it.

“We can fix it up for you, if you like. Phasma’s a whiz —”

She shook her head, absently. “It just needs a tow. I can do it if I have my tools --“

Kenobi House was not her home, and the prospect of returning without Chewie was enough to set her heart at a jackknife pace, but she wouldn’t — couldn’t — stand another second of being around Snoke and his minions, not with Phasma on the steady approach, carrying that carcass. Dripping pig’s blood.

What the hell was it with this town and its animal heads?

She begged off, saying the first ludicrous thing that came to mind, not recalling her harried drive to Sarini Hollow at all —

“I’ll walk. It’s fine.”

She’d walk all the way back and forth, carrying her toolbox, if that’s what it took to get the car running again. Rey wouldn’t let anyone else touch it. Not for a million bucks.

Snoke laughed. Hux joined him. “She’s as pale as a sheet — looks about ready to crumple, and she’ll _walk_.”

Only Ben remained watchful, carefully skirting her while it felt as if the others closed in.

A little chanting and they black robes might’ve made it all the more oppressive, but even with Phasma a few feet away, she could smell the blood. She needed to move.

“I can drive you.” The offer was delivered in such a low undertone, she might’ve misheard: but the intensity of his attention lifted her chin, breathed hope through her tension. It lasted only a moment before Rey felt her face heat, recalling exactly what had put her in this position to begin with — the house, her dog, and a single, fateful moment where they’d pressed their hands together.

Surely, he’d felt it too — and if he had, what might’ve Ben seen?

She turned away before the stars in his eyes could dim to their deaths, not wanting to see the darkness that remained when she said, “No. It’s okay.”

A beat further felt as if everyone held their breaths.

She wanted to accept his help. She wanted to figure this out. But for her damnable, traitor heart and how it left her head swimming when Ben stood so close that she could smell his skin, the afterimage of the corn field and the blood too much to shake off.

“The fresh air will clear my head.” She forced a smile for Snoke, showing him she wasn’t afraid. Faking it until it became truth. “I need it, after today. It’s been a long one.”

His smile was edged with strychnine. “Was it, now.”

With a final glance at Ben, Rey slipped from behind them.

“Best mind yourself, girl — walking home past the fields in the dark,” Snoke said after her. “Dangerous for anyone to go alone.”

She stamped the bristling irritation that it inspired, shooting a glance at him as she stalked past the Falcon.

“I’ll be back for the car in the morning,” she said, giving them tight smiles. “Take care of her until then, would you?”

She’d leave it behind if it meant a faster escape. She’d walk if it kept her from any further enclosed spaces where she’d find herself trapped with Ben’s scrutiny.

The sun had the grim cast betraying its descent, turning the clouds afire in a mottled patchwork. She’d make it back in time, she told herself — relief unspooling now that she’d ventured onto the road. Kenobi House sat a mere four kilometres from the Hollow; a forty minute walk at best, thirty if she hoofed it. Shoving her hands in her pockets, she shot a glance back at Ben, who looked on with something new pinching the corners of his eyes: worry, perhaps, she thought.

Before she fell out of view, Snoke called after her, “Mind yourself, girl. Don’t let the corn demons get ya.”

Bristling, she continued onward, barely taking note of the low-slung porches and sagging fences of the Hollow, a few wary faces pressed to grimy glass as she passed.

In one window, a child’s grubby features was framed between shutters, curious eyes following her progress as she hastened to get away.

Some burst onto porches, small, bare feet slapping wood, the sound interspersed with giggling. Rey looked back long enough to see a patchwork dress, the tattered remains of a corn doll dangling from small fingers that didn’t wave her goodbye.

\--

Crossing the worn wood bridge over the creek put her back on the dirt road, facing miles of orange crush sky and hazy fields. Out here, soy grew rampant, the harvesters peeling back the crop so that black earth revealed itself in strips. No farm machinery left on the fields. She shoved her hands in her pockets, thinking she could feel the weight of Ben’s gaze resting between her shoulder blades like a touch as she crunched over gravel, the larger stones biting into her soles as she took the long stretch home.

Well, “home’ was a misnomer: Kenobi House.

Not quite hers though certainly if there was a deed Leia would see to it.

It wasn’t something she wanted. Not like this.

A late-season cicada started up its high-pitched whine in the trees behind her, crying for all the world as if there was something out here that would hear it’s plea. As abruptly, the sound stopped.

A glance over her shoulder revealed nothing more than the ragged trees that flanked the Hollow; no one followed her.

Judging by the light, she’d spent the afternoon on the couch, and judging by her rumbling stomach, she’d missed dinner. Slept through lunch. Sleeplessness scrubbed in her eyes and a rock took up occupancy in her shoe, the soy became wheat fields, climbing to waist-height where the smaller, stunted crop only hit her at the knee. Not a soul on the road. No cars. No trucks. Distant farmhouses lit their lights in defence against the evening as the last blazing rays of the sun appeared briefly through the clouds, sending mottles over the fields and turning those waves made by the breeze into rolling gold.

The brief beauty was fleeting, as soon it dimmed to grey veiling the fire of sunset.

The wind continued, and Rey walked onward despite the creeping chill that spun through the holes in her sweater.

Night came quicker out here, she thought — remnants of Snoke’s words drawing her gaze to the fields that flanked her. Ten minutes in, and she began admiring their hypnotic rhythms, lulling her feet to a slow amble.

The thought that had it been either crop other than corn, she might’ve seen some indication of where Chewie had gone off to if it was just a little shorter. Rey balled her hands into her sleeves, folding her arms around herself.

She’d left the back door unlocked last night, she told herself. In her hysterics, she must have mis-seen the stains on the ground — might not have even stepped in it. She was sleep-deprived. Harried from nightmares that stuck to her with the determination of tree sap, leaving her distracted and struggling with the impossible before the improbable.

She hadn’t thought she’d been so careless, but the episode in the cellar had left her skittish, and regardless of what she’d thought she’d heard, she wasn’t beyond distraction. And Chewie wasn’t beyond determination. A rabbit might’ve drawn him out into the field. Hell, even an ill-meaning squirrel would have done the trick.

A movement to her left caught her attention, but when she turned, she saw only the blank canvas of threshed rows. A wall of desiccated stalks rose ahead of her beyond a barb-wired fence that separated one farm from the next.

Her feet stammered to a stop, ceasing all forward motion and noise — even her breathing — for a moment. Listening, she strained her ears to hear something more than the hush of whispers from the crop. Nothing unfamiliar out there, though the prickling that began across her shoulders trickled down her back like a curious spider. She shivered, shifting in her clothes to shake it.

Rey looked behind her to the empty stretch of road, uncertain suddenly how far she’d walked. She couldn’t see Sarini Hollow in the distance, though she hadn’t thought she’d crossed any hills or taken any turns down the single stretch of country road that would send her back to where she’d come from.

She licked her lips. Chapped. Chewed the hard flakes, thinking.

In the time she stood there, the sky descended to the color of an old bruise, still edged in the painful jaundiced hues of the sick and infirm: it was a sky that remembered better times, but suffered for them under that endless horizon.

She kept moving, eyeing the wall of corn before her and wondering was it her field that she approached? A dark hulk in the distance might’ve been a barn, or it may have been Kenobi house — but she couldn’t rightly be certain of either. The corn rustled as she passed, beckoning to her as if in greeting.

At the edge of the property, limned and draped in tattered strands, she could cloth strips knotted around the fence in places, drifting and spent to tangles in the breeze.

The wind carried the unmistakable scent of burning fat to her — a greasy, slick smell laced with bonfire smoke. Where it came from, she had no idea, but as she wondered about it, she found herself drifting to the middle of the road to walk the pale line where neither field rose too close to her on either side.

The prevailing heaviness of attention settled on her, the feeling not unlike walking into a crowded room where she became the central focus for creating a disruption just from entering —

Staring straight ahead, she kept her course, nerves clutching her stomach and twisting it around. She wasn’t hungry anymore; all thoughts of sustenance driven for her as the world fell quiet. All she could hear was the hushed conference of the corn, whispering around her in its curious cadence.

Her feet stammered to a stop, and, staring dead ahead, Rey pressed a palm to her chest as her heart started to pound. She couldn’t be sure why she stopped, gloaming’s hand falling heavy around her in bluish hues that painted the world silver and dark.

To her left, something winked to life — a flicker of light between the blades of leaves, the furrow walks resolving themselves to shadow when she turned to find nothing there at all.

Some instinct told her not to take another step, the anxious anticipation of building silence keeping her rooted, as if making a sound would be her doom. That dark hulk in the distance, surely, she thought, was in fact her end destination — but the distance between her and the house stretched, becoming impossible and oppressive the longer she stood there, waiting for some proof that she wasn’t alone. Disorientation made her hesitate, a rustle in the stalks far into the field at her right dragging her attention there.

Rey couldn’t find her voice to call out.

Shadows thickened.

She waited, searching the darkening field.

No lights out here, not like the city — she realized. The farthest streetlights might reside in town, or perhaps in the Hollow where the people might use their torchlights to lift the veil of night when it was needed. Not here.

Her shoulders rose and fell with steady heaves, her breaths drawn with more difficulty the longer she stared. Waiting.

A snap to her left ripped her around, and then, Rey found her legs.

Then she was running flat out down the road and towards home, eyes fixed dead ahead, a panicked, startled breath still caught in her throat as all sense and reason fled.

The afterimage that lingered couldn’t have been real, but a warning bearing Snoke’s voice spurred her onwards, her lungs searing with fire, the feeling in her legs falling away altogether the harder and faster she pushed herself towards safety —

Behind her, the rustle in the stalks turned frenetic — a chaos drawn from some deep place that knew true darkness, not the subtle half-cast of moonlight hidden behind clouds.

Rey ran, blinking away streaming tears from keeping her eyes open, waiting for some other sign that she wasn’t alone, but not daring to look to either side where dim red lights appeared in the corn between the furrows.

They revealed themselves in pairs: twin dots, spaced in equal measure from each other.

Eyes in the field.

They followed, though Rey refused to look at them head-on, lest they take more notice than she’d given them.

She skidded around the corner of the drive, tearing up the long stretch to Kenobi House’s darkened bulk without care for her screaming feet, her burning lungs, or the cold sweat that stuck her clothes to her skin. Flying through the door, she tripped over the threshold, slamming it behind her and smashing her shoulder into it as she threw the deadbolt into place.

Panting, her hands shaking, she flipped the porch light.

Only then did she dare look outside to the corn.

Nothing.

Field spirits. Corn demons.

Nothing but the grain.

Shaking, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, finding her fingers trembling. She couldn’t rule be certain of what she’d seen, but the feeling of being watched lingered. Being followed, moreso. Hadn’t they vanished when she’d looked to them? Or had they followed?

She gulped a breath, setting aside the darker possibility that she wasn’t certain what “they” were to begin with, only that she knew she hadn’t been alone on the road. Something was in the corn. Watching.

Peering through the slats of windows in the door, she backed up until her shoulder bumped the newel post at the foot of the staircase. The house settled and groaned around her, it’s complaints an airy, aged thing whose upset at her interruption left its floorboards complaining. Heart pounding, she listened as if expecting something more the longer she strained. Licking her lips, she eased into the hall, flicking on the lights as she passed each room, setting them humming with amber casts.

The house was empty, of that she was sure — but she latched the backdoor twice just to be sure after checking to make sure that Chewie hadn’t returned. Knowing him, he’d get hungry eventually and come trundling back. He was old, but by no means was he dumb.

The thought didn’t stop her heart from pounding, her ribs lifting with the fierceness of each beat.

She stood at the back door, bolted and safe, watching night fall over the field while straining her eyes in the dim light for some sign that there were others out there.

A cruel joke, perhaps — as easily executed as rustling a few leaves with a violence to scare her off. They were doing a damn fine job of it, she thought: the possibility that Snoke and company could execute a hoax like this with such calculated efficiency would be worth commending. She nearly laughed, the sound dying before it left her lips.

Even though the closed windows, she thought she could smell the scent of cooking fat as it wafted over the field. Nothing but the impenetrable wall of corn remained out there, the bleached grass of the lawn waving to the stalks lazily. Nothing peered back at her. No lights between the grain; not even fireflies. The season was too late for that anyhow.

An errant thought touched her, leaving a shiver in its wake.

No one had said Obiwan had farmed the land, but if he had, and had he lived, would he have peeled back the crop by now?

She swallowed the lump in her throat, her breathing still loud in her ears.

If she culled the corn back — if she razed the field — what would she find, there?

She shivered, gripping the back of a chair and dragging it on its back legs after her as she eased back down the hall, her legs shuddering along with her nerves, and climbed to the second floor. Below, she let the lights on for the night. Upstairs, she closed the doors of the unused bedrooms, stealing into her own with a last glance back into the hall before she set the chair under the doorknob, kicking it hard into place so that the door couldn’t budge.

Finally, and only then, did she roll her head on her neck, trying to work out the lingering tension.

Chewie’s blanket remained at the foot of the bed, and she side-stepped it, not wanting to fold it away in case he returned. He’d be back, she told herself, stepping close to the window — close enough that her reflection dissolved into the blackness and she could make out the details in the field below.

Across the field and near the distant trees of Sarini Fell, she thought she could see the faintest pips of light against the dark; flickering like candles to be swallowed by the wood. Torches, she thought — people bearing torches into the wood for the festival. It didn’t made her feel any better.

Frowning, she leaned closer until her forehead touched the cool glass.

Rey exhaled, the jitteriness subsiding a hair. Sweat stuck her shirt to her back, her shoulder blades crunched and taut. She could’ve done with a bath, had she been home — had Chewie been nearby to make her feel a little safer than having to do things alone. The darkness outside was a curtain, the darkness indoors slithering and oppressive. She cared for neither, but couldn’t bring herself to wash it off. Not like this. Not still believing he was out there.

The grime of the day hung like a pall, sadness and sour fear clinging like an unpleasant perfume.

The darkness grew oppressive the longer she stared, though nothing resolved itself into form, and nothing emerged from the corn. She backed away from the window, scrubbing at her arms, unsticking the sweater from her skin and dropping it in the same place she’d pulled it from that morning. It took a moment of staring at the blanket at her feet, the garment draped over the footboard, to will herself to move away.

She’s find Chewie, she told herself.

He was out there, and she would find him if it took everything.

Rey balled her fists, her nails digging into her palms offering the sharp bite of clarity.

He’d been alone and begging for scraps, hanging about Unkar Plutt’s garage for months before he’d willingly accepted her handouts. It had taken as long for him to trust her, before even accepting a bit of turkey jerky for her efforts at becoming friendly with him.

Plutt had always said the dog had arrived with the car, the Falcon his second home.

Rey put her hands on her hips, her chin crumpling with the effort not to cry the longer she thought of it. Her sneakers were clean, washed of any evidence that it had been there, and now she wasn’t certain of what she’d seen at all. Had her panic gotten the best of her? Had she imagined it?

A glance at the window, and she knew what she’d been searching for out there in the dark:

Not that she could have seen it, but she wanted to confirm for herself if what she thought she’d seen that morning was real:

She’d been looking for blood.


	14. Photograph

Rey found herself hovering, the feeling of eyes on her persisting though there was nothing out there she could see, and with two decisive steps, she snapped the curtains shut, effectively blotting out the possibility that anything might be looking back at her.

A laugh escaped her — sharp to the point of being shrill, and she stalked away, her nerves becoming a marching series of ants up her legs, prickling over the skin of her thighs.

Snapping the cord on the lamp on the bedside table, a small circle of amber bathed the little ledger she’d left there the day before. Eyeing it now, she chewed her lip, sitting down on the bed though its creaking springs made her flinch, curling her legs under herself as she edged her shoes off, leaving them on the floor.

She exhaled, thumbing the book open, trying to focus on the words though her imaginings drew her eyes back to the window, threatening heavier contemplations of what the night might bring in the old farm house.

More voices, perhaps. More beckoning whispers wanting to draw her to the field again in the night.

Goosebumps rippled over her skin. Rubbing her arms didn’t stop the feeling, and distraction felt slightly out of reach though she strained for it.

The spine of the book crackled under her hands, the fragile feeling of its paper bones like a small bird that threatened escape as the pages slid from their stitches, drooping with age and tiredness even though she tried to hold the long lists of debts together.

Her eyes blurred momentarily, and wiping at the corner of her eye, she saw something unusual etched into the inside cover — penciled with faded graphite:

Frowning at it, she brought the page closer to the light to better see the marking. It seemed familiar, somehow, and struggling to place it, it occurred to her that she’d seen a similar symbol scratched over the diner’s doorway when she’d first arrived in Junari Point. Another carved into the lintel over the hardware store’s door:

This had been written into the book in a hasty hand — three parallel lines: two small, one large, bisected by an arc that crossed them all.

She shivered, not knowing why it somehow reminded her of the field of corn:

Of a setting sun over the grain.

Certain that the marks were connected somehow, she tipped the book, flipping the pages hastily to see if there were others hidden within the pages, but instead, something surprising fluttered to the blanket, catching on her crossed legs.

A photo so old its edges were deckled.

She flipped it over, finding that half of the colours were too vibrant — a smear of over-exposure washing out the three figures captured in time.

Two men and a woman, leaning against a car that she recognized: an ’86 Silverado with a custom paint job — new and gleaming in the Illinois sun. Only the woman she recognized — Mayor Organa when she was hardly more than a slip of a girl, long brown hair hanging to her waist, smiling with her arms around the sides of two young men Rey didn’t recognize. Certainly, the shorter of the two who hugged her so affectionately could have been her beau — but the similarity in their smiles was a little unsettling. Their heights, too.

Rey frowned, looking between them and deciding that here was a piece of history misplaced. The way their eyes crinkled at the corners, the cut of their mouths — they might’ve been siblings.

Leia’s belly was the size of a small planet, her expectant smile radiating joy like the sun.

The other leaned against the Falcon, an arm draped casually over the door, smiling smugly over Leia’s head at the cameraman.

His car, Rey though. His girl?

No ring on either of their hands, she noted.

And yet — something familiar about him, too: echoes of something she ought to recognize in the shape of his jaw, the fullness of his mouth. It was the rogue grin that threw her: a smile she’d never seen on Han Solo’s son, but the other pieces felt familiar in the way that she was beginning to understand’s Ben’s face, had his features not been diluted. Ben was taller, besides — much taller.

“Shit,” she breathed.

She flipped over the photo, finding a word written in pencil on the back: _Hafferkonigen_.

She’d heard the word before, or at least, something similar. The variant Snoke used had fewer syllables.

It wasn’t English, at least, and reaching for her phone to search for it on the internet, it was a moment further staring at the non-existent cellular bars on the screen that she remembered: no signal. No internet. Definitely no data roaming.

She dropped the phone.

Useless.

If Obiwan had took this picture, it must have been because these people were important to him. She thought of the chairs in the cellar, multiple glasses of moonshine shared between friends, eventually left behind and locked up to be forgotten. Or hidden.

“_Hafferkonigen_,” she sounded out the word, tasting its rough consonants, and thinking of mother and son, titles and legacies handed down over generations —

She started, the sound of a fist on glass loud in the closed bedroom.

The ledger hit the floor with a thud, her heart fit to burst as she jerked back on the bed, shoving as far from the window as possible. With the curtains closed, she couldn’t imagine what new form of torture awaited her, but whatever was out there wanted her attention. The sound came again, insistent — like a hammer on the wood, rattling the glass.

She whipped off the bed, searching for a weapon — a bat. A hammer. Anything.

A strangled cry through the glass caught her off guard, just as she ripped the bedside lamp from the wall socket, holding the blunt end before her in case she needed to bludgeon whatever awaited her outside.

Her name, shouted with human vocal chords.

Not a whisper.

Not a dream.

Her hands slick on the lamp, she edged closer to the window, grasping it and ready to swing wide if this was some new trick meant to lure her outside — or worse, meant to lure them in.

She grasped the curtain, ripping it back with a shout as the pale face and wide, dark eyes in the window hovered in the black.

“Rey?” Ben said through the glass. “It’s me.”

Muffled as he was, it sounded like him, but the blood rushing in her ears didn’t settle, and it was a moment further before she realized that he wasn’t floating, disembodied, at the second floor. He stood in a crouch on the gallery roof, a mere three feet between her window and a twelve foot drop to the earth.

“I knocked,” he said. “But when you didn’t answer I started getting worried. Called too.”

He glanced at the lamp in her hand.

“What were you doing with that?”

She swallowed, her face heating. Not a spectre. Just Ben, she told herself, but still, she didn’t flip the latch to let him in. Echoes of the day remained, leaving her cautious and ready to scrutinize every detail.

He carried no visible weapons. No scythe.

“How did you get up here?”

He raked his fingers through his hair. Wiped his mouth. Offered a futile gesture that suggested this was a last resort, and he felt just as big an idiot as she did.

“Trellis,” he said, irritated. “And determination to see that you got in okay.”

She hesitated.

“Can I come in?”

“H-how --“ she stopped herself, feeling ridiculous. Gathering what sense she possessed, and remembering every vampire film she’d ever seen, she managed, “How do I know it’s you?”

He regarded her with incredulity only a moment, and then sobered. Glanced back at the field, and then to her, his expression pinched.

“When you touched my hand this afternoon, you ran from me so fast I thought I’d burned you with just the tips of my fingers. I thought you might’ve known, then —” He stopped.

Her heart gave a stubborn, embarrassed chug of surprise.

“What? Might’ve known what?”

Pink splotched mottled his cheeks, and he blew out a breath. Pulled his lower lip between his teeth in a way that was oddly hypnotic.

“I was thinking of what it might be like if I kissed you,” he admitted. He cleared his throat. Squinted into the dark to avoid her gaze. “Thought you might’ve felt how it was burning me up inside.”

Shit.

He glanced back, searching her expression as if not wholly wanting to see her reaction.

The exhale was longer, leaving her breath in a cloud against the glass. Though her heart pounded, now, she found it was for a different reason altogether.

“I’m sorry, by the way,” he said.

He didn’t know. He didn’t understand that when they’d touched hands, something had passed between them: a portent of sorts, she thought — a vision, otherwise. A nightmare wrested from the world of dreams and made flesh.

And Ben?

He no longer wore a look of sad resignation. He’d steeled himself and offered her only honesty to ensure that she was alright. Truthfully, Rey couldn’t rightly say that she was. Everything was impossible: perverted by her shitty little stay in this horrid little town, in this awful little house with its mangled history that she couldn’t quite seem to tear from its walls.

Her eyes burned.

The hell had her grandfather been doing out here for so long, under these conditions?

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak as she set the lamp down, wiped her hands on her jeans, and unlatched the window. It shuddered as she tried to heave it open, and Ben let her. His long hands dangled between his knees, pale in the light spilling from her bedroom.

Cool air smelling of autumn’s faint decay, the crisp smell of an oncoming frost, and the sweet bite of hay spilled inside. She shivered, stepping back to allow him over the low wall.

“Wait,” she said, peering at him. “You’re not —” She pressed her lips together. “If I invite you in, you’re not going to surprise me with something ridiculous, are you?”

He raised both eyebrows in question.

“Like,” she struggled with it a moment further, “inviting you in isn’t also invitation to drink my blood.”

Though he tried to hold his amusement in check, his poker face collapsed into look of incredulity that he tried and failed to smother.

He chuffed a strangled laugh.

She pointed at the lamp. “I know how to use the blunt end of a heavy object.”

Ben’s smile dimmed until is remained barely a ghost of its former self, realizing she wasn’t actually trying to add levity to an already fucked-up situation.

“I got your car to turn over,” he told her. “Alternator’s fine; engine was a little overheated is all. Drove it out here myself seeing as I figured you might need it to get around. No sense in having you stranded.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I’ll go,” he offered, making to slide off the porch’s roof before she could open her mouth to thank him.

“Hey.” Her voice cracked. “You don’t have to --“

Rey clamped her mouth shut, wrestling with the possibility that there was nothing at all wrong with the town and its inhabitants; that everything was likely perfectly normal, and finally, that the stress was making her manifest her worst nightmares she’d never known.

“Iwantedyouto,” she said in a rush. 

Stars, she sounded like an idiot.

“On your couch. Today.”

Her face prickled with heat, a blush so fearsome she was certain her face would melt off at any second.

She forced an exhale. “I wanted that too.”

The rest of it — the vision? The nightmare that Ben was actually some fallen, reaping angel intent on cleaving her head from her body in the effort to feed the parched soil? Nope. She decided then and there: no, he did not need to know that she was now suffering hallucinations too.

“Come in,” she managed.

He hesitated a moment further, scrutinizing the sincerity of the invitation, and looking doubtful as to whether or not it was the best idea. Hell, she wasn’t even sure anymore —

Rey stepped back from the window, giving him room to unfold his impossibly long limbs, and crammed her hands into her pockets as if that would stop the low tremors she felt at having him join her like this.

He eased his shoulders through first, his knee knocking the siding before rising before her — swathed in the same dark clothes he’d had on earlier. No ritual robes, she noted. No masks for him either.

One glance at the chair under the doorknob and Ben’s frown was back.

He scrubbed the back of his head, managing a nod, as if to say, “Okay.”

Her face blazed, and Rey closed her eyes for a little longer than a standard blink, trying to make sense of this situation: locked in her bedroom with a strange man, not entirely knowing the things that sat between them, and unable to express to him what she believed she’d seen outside.

The smell of him filled the space, wrapped with the autumn chill and scent of cut grass.

“Thank you,” she managed, her socked feet curling into the floorboards. She didn’t know what to do with herself all of a sudden, her nerves flaring with his proximity and not knowing what it meant. “For the car, and for earlier.” She nodded, not looking at him. “Can I get you something to drink?” she offered, the absurdity of how close they found themselves making her want to push the chair from the door to allow for at least one sensible means of escape.

The breeze stirred the stale air of her room, and gingerly, Ben retrieved her lamp, placing it back on the bedside table. A flutter from the bed caught both their attention, and too late, Rey realized that she’d left the ledger and the photograph out for him to find.

Once he’d taken a step forward, long fingers collecting the book and its broken spine with a delicate touch from the floor, she realized the weight of her error. The photograph followed, as if the two artifacts were meant to be delivered together.

He handled both objects with care, but the line that drew a furrow over his brows held her attention like a caged thing, her suspicions beating against the urge to back away from him; a shadow crossed his features, and Rey was reminded too acutely of the vision she’d had when they’d reached for each other that morning.

“Where did you find this?”

His voice had the low stirrings of sadness, a weight that drew the timber down in octaves.

She licked her lip, finding her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth as she did her best to clear her throat — keep it level.

His sorrow slipped around her like the arm of an old friend. Her heart sank. She knew who the man in the photograph was, and now that she looked over his son, she found that the heaviness of his losses did nothing more to a man than drag him down to earth — rendering him in the washed out hues of the dispossessed. He chuffed a laugh absent of humour, running his thumb across an image stolen from time; over the face of his father.

Here was no creature of phantasm from her nightmares; neither spectre nor shade — merely a boy who’d lost those most important to him, and without their guidance, his way home.

When Ben sank to the edge of her bed, he wore a rueful smile that drew her forward a step, as if the expression was a mask that he might not hold in place much longer.

“This house had a root cellar,” she explained. “Chewie found the door beneath one of the cinder blocks in the parlour, under the coffee table. The door was covered over with a carpet.”

Carefully, her steps whisper soft, she joined him. The creak of the mattress beneath them seemed to sink them a little closer to the floor.

“A root cellar,” he echoed.

She huffed a laugh, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, uncertain if she should tell him the details: that she’d climbed down there only to hear her house invaded by someone or something that not even her dog could catch. Her heart clutched at the thought of Chewie’s frantic barking, her throat closing at the possibility that she might never hear his deafening barks again, and swallowed the lump in her throat.

“Yes, except that Obi-Wan wasn’t putting it to its intended purpose. Hadn’t for some time.”

He glanced at her, so near that their arms touched — flannel against skin. She could feel the warmth of him through his sleeve, his attention sinking to her collarbone and leaving the heavy caress of his gaze in a line up her throat.

She licked her lip, turning away. “I think he was distilling moonshine. There are still bottles down there. Bathtubs too.”

A small smile quirked the corner of his mouth as he flipped the photo, brushing his thumb over the word there. Sorrow hung like a pall over him. He said nothing. Didn’t even make a noise of interest as he handed it back to her.

“You don’t want it?” she found herself asking.

Ben shook his head, opening the ledger with delicate hands.

Stupid question.

He drew in a huge breath. “My old man was a smuggler,” he said, not looking at her, or the photo — as if he’d had enough time to consider the past in the breadth of a few heartbeats. “‘Shine so potent you could use it to burn your barn down if you only had a match. Used to use it in the lanterns, when I was a kid. Never knew no better.” He glanced at her. “Enough of that stuff could level half your field and anything on it. Dad kept it in gasoline cans when he ran out of bottles.”

Showing her the long string of red markings that signified debts so grandiose that not even a king might’ve paid them off, he exhaled, seeming to deflate. At least two lifetimes of it stared at them from the little book.

“No doubt, Obi-Wan had a hand in the trade, but it was my father who ran ‘shine between here and Coruscant. Junari Point’s a good outpost for people’s forgetting about you if you were in need of a hideout.” He passed her back the book. “Well, most people who aren’t Han Solo. Some folks don’t forget so easy.”

A frown worried at her, deepening as she ran her thumb over the traceries made by a pencil’s hard markings.

“You’re saying that these were your father’s debts?”

“He was old friends with your grandfather through my uncle,” he explained, tapping the second man in the photo. “Haven’t seen Luke in years. He got out of here in the late nineties. Never came back.” Ben wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and Rey noticed his fingers shook a little. “Don’t know if my mother ever forgave him; she never forgave dad for getting himself killed, I know that much. And you’ve met my mother. Like taking a match to kerosene, Uncle Luke used to say about my parents.”

Rooted, her heart ticking, Rey nudged the pieces together:

A younger version of Leia in the photograph, pregnant with Ben. A lost husband. An estranged uncle. A son under suspicion.

She searched his features, understanding tickling. “You spent time here at Kenobi House as a child.” While they were mid-trade.

He heaved a sigh, looking into some far-off past that gave him cause to cringe. “Too young to remember much about that. I wouldn’t have known what they were doing anyway. I remember the arguments.” He trailed off.

But not what they were about.

Rey thought of the look the Mayor wore as she sidled into the street, Ben’s watchful gaze on them both — speculative.

“Hardship pushes folk apart, sometimes,” he told her, seeing her struggle with the fractures of his past and not knowing what to say about it. “Sometimes, it brings them together. Funny thing, that.”

He pressed the photo into her hands, careful that their fingers shouldn’t brush.

A pensive silence weighted them as she looked down at the three smiling ghosts in the photo. Rey brushed her thumb across the deckled edge.

“I know enough of Obi-Wan that while he was still right in the head, he cared for anyone who walked through his front door. Took a special shine to my uncle.” He glanced at her. “Thought I had something special too, I think. Might’ve just been Obi-Wan’s particular breed of kindness.”

“The Falcon —” Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “I should’ve realized — no one puts that much interest in an old clunker like that.”

He huffed a laugh, but even that was tinged with melancholy.

Ben’s shoulder brushed hers as he settled, kicking his heels out before him on the floor and cracking his neck. He opened his eyes to the ceiling instead of looking at her, the taut lines of his shirt drawn in sharp angles of tension that curried her attention.

She forced her gaze away, aware too suddenly of how her knee brushed his thigh, and thinking it too obvious to move too quickly, left it there though the warmth of her skin could surely burn through their clothes.

“The Falcon was my father’s,” he admitted. “My mother couldn’t stand to look at it after he died, so she sold it off on the cheap to an old friend of his. Never forgave her for it. Spent years trying to track it down. And you showed up in it.”

Dark eyes found hers, holding her pinned and struggling a moment to find the words — she wasn’t sure if she should apologize, or sympathize. It was a decent car. It came to her when she’d needed it, and it had delivered her to his doorstep.

“Seemed a little like destiny at the time.”

A sadness clung to him, draped off his shoulders like a mantle he’d found top heavy to carry after too long. His movements possessed a slow certainty that left her feeling as if each recoil of the springs in the mattress beneath them was meant to be herded, carefully controlled as if too sudden a movement would scare her off. He shifted, the press of his jeans against her thigh a tantalizing friction. She watched his long fingers fold into the thin weave of her rumpled blankets in a gesture that was too intimate for something so simple. He folded them in his lap, cautious and waiting, no longer making eye contact though it took everything for her not to reach for the hard calluses she found herself desperately wanting to smooth with a touch.

You’re not alone, he’d told her.

But with inches between them, it might’ve been a gulf.

All that loss and heartache had helped Ben carve a place for himself, but the thing that left Rey wondering was why he’d chosen to make it beside Snoke. What had the man offered him that could make someone so low with regret — to make someone feel so isolated. So lost.

Her voice cracked. “And not any longer?”

Ben’s eyes when he turned his gaze on her — the vision of shadow and blood she’d seen earlier gone utterly. In its place, pools as deep as the night sky and glittering with distant stars.

Weighing the words, he managed through a strangled start, “My family — is not something I can deny.” He opened his mouth to say more, then thought the better of it. Shook his head. Tried again. “My family —” he said, sounding strained. “My legacy —”

Brow furrowing, he appeared to be considering how much he could reveal.

“You can tell me,” she said, thoughts of Snoke and Hux and Phasma — a younger, innocent, and more impressionable Ben lost and alone and suffering, and subject to them: their whims, their folklore, their fear mongering. Rey grit her teeth against it all.

She could see it in his eyes: the desire for something more. She could see what it would cost him to stand apart from them, to leave this town and everything he knew. She knew what that sacrifice would mean; that it would cost him everything.

“Rey —”

“I can _help_ you.”

Still, the hesitation cost him. The draw towards him was instinctual, the urge to place her hand on his arm as strong as the desire to crawl into his lap. The distance between them appeared to shrink, winding them taut together the longer they remained fighting it. It began to hurt — wanting to show him how badly she wanted to fight _for_ him, while not knowing at all what she stood against.

Rey felt the brush of his dark curls over her cheek like a phantom caress, the immediate dangers of touching his skin forgotten when his mouth was so near hers — so close, in fact, that it felt as if they shared the same breath. Neither moved, but Rey found she could identify each individual lash that brushed his cheek when he blinked, and that her lips tingled the longer he watched her mouth like that — like he was considering taking what wasn’t yet offered, and that he’d ask forgiveness for it later.

“But you don’t want me to.”

He swallowed, his knuckles whitening with the effort to keep his hands clasped.

“No,” he said, his gaze flicking to hers.

The thought crossed her mind to tell him why she’d run from him, but chewing on her lip as she was to dull the sensation of needing him to touch her, she couldn’t explain it: she didn’t understand what she’d seen, she couldn’t explain why she felt as if this were fated.

“I know,” she said. He searched her expression. “I’ve always been alone, so I know what it is — and I know what it feels like.” She licked her lips, the movement proving hypnotic for him. Loosed, his fingers trapped a stray lock of hair that had fallen loose, brushing it away from her face in a gesture that dangled between danger and seduction. She shivered, trying to get the words out, goosebumps threatening. “Only, when I’m with you, I don’t want to anymore.”

She nodded. That was exactly right.

“I feel as if I’ve been searching for you —“ He flinched, as if the admission caused him pain. “For a very long time.”

The shudder came unbidden, memories of the vision rising as if to superimpose themselves against the tenderness he showed her now.

“And yes,” he said, regarding the tracery of her freckles with care, his fingers undoing themselves and hovering over his knees, the bed shifting her towards him as they sank together in a single motion. “It still feels like —“

“Destiny,” she finished for him, trailed by thoughts of shadows and tall trees, long furrows between the fields, gold waves rising over head, the scent of earth in her mouth — rich and fertile and welcoming on a summer’s day, cool against hot skin. Shadows over the field. Sun-baked sweetness not soon forgotten beneath autumn’s chill.

She couldn’t help herself, and as the brush of those long fingers seeped through the thin cotton of her shirt, pressing into skin as he drew her to him in a movement that held the fluidity of wind over the fields — rolling her backwards as his mouth descended while she parted for him. She fell back into the soft pillows, cradled in his arms as he pressed her lips apart, his tongue seeking hers.

Warmth pooled between them, and not knowing she’s been cold, Rey rose to meet it — parts of them aligning while others tangled, some distant world echoing with creaking springs and groaning floorboards. Destinies intertwined, knotted in places that gasped and sang with longing.

“You should stay away from me,” he said into her mouth, but kissing him anyway, Rey smothered the words.

He drew back, placing small trails along her jaw to her cheek, and eyes fluttering, she thought something whispered between them like the echo of a distant dream that remembered sunshine above steel clouds. The thought that they shouldn’t threatened, but he tasted like rain, and being of the desert, Rey couldn’t say that there was anything finer to slake a thirst she hadn’t known she’d had.

He tasted like home.

The kiss became tentative; delicate in a way that made it seem as if he’d regained his senses before her, and drawing back, she responded as if testing the waters. The feel of his hands raking up her ribs, thumbs brushing the sides of her breasts and sliding from her shoulders and into her hair was almost enough to undo her, but some cautionary note lingered — stopping him from pulling her full into his lap.

She burned with it, desire turning the moment heady as surprise bled through her need for him when his hand found her hip and his mouth found the hollow in her throat.

It felt as if something clicked into place, then:

Like they fit together.

Drawing back, storm clouds filled her vision — Ben’s eyes promising only the secrets that revelled when starlight failed; in the places where the moon might not touch. Whispers of things she wanted but couldn’t touch — the silent, still night and all its secrets a breath away.

He licked his lips, tasting her, their chests rising and falling together in synchronicity.

Yes, she thought, and some part of her felt everything she’d been lacking as surely as the quivering strain of his muscles when he braced himself over her and she sank her fingers into his hair, drawing him back to her mouth:

These were the first steps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm super flattered by the response to this story, and extra flattered that MissFLT was kind enough to create [fan art for this chapter](https://twitter.com/MissFLT/status/1186971175848697856?s=09). Thank you so much for your comments and enthusiasm; you're really making my season, guys, I appreciate it so much.


	15. Hand of Glory

Past noon, Rey slammed the Falcon’s door, still weighing the stirred feeling in her bones — the sensation that not all was right, and that it might be best to slake her frustration with a cold shower. She’d done with the bath that morning, though the water had sputtered grey-brown for a few moments, and though it was hard to rise off the soap, she felt better for it.

Her clothes bore the musty smell of the house, faint trails of age and mildew working under her skin.

Ben hadn’t stayed, and she couldn’t rightly say that she was happy about it, nor sad. He’d drawn himself from her, leaving her in a gentle heap — red-faced and rumpled, her lips tingling — apologizing with that dark weight about himself that might’ve spelled guilt.

He wasn’t accustomed to this sort of thing, he’d told her, though his touch might’ve persuaded her otherwise: earnestness mixed with skill turning each caress into a demand for more. She might’ve mewled. She could’ve cried at the vaguest notion that he needed to attend the bonfire, else Snoke would’ve sent someone for him —

Still, he’d left.

She suspected it was for the best. Or at least, that’s what she told herself in the aftermath of his kiss.

A nervous frustration kept her running warm, and as grateful as she was that they hadn’t gone any further, some part of her remained knotted with frustration that they hadn’t.

She hadn’t stopped to tell him about the eyes in the field, either, though he’d claimed that walking home was hardly any trouble when she’d offered to drive him back.

Parked with her hip against the car door, she regarded the old Gather House, trying to sort herself and her feelings about meeting with his mother, now:

What was she supposed to tell Leia?

That her son had spilled all her secrets, and there was no use being coy?

Rey bristled, dropped the coffee in a dented bin, and set her mouth into a grim line. 

She might’ve just told her the truth to begin with. The dishonesty sat on her like a pall, coating her with a mistrust so fine it left her pinched and prickling.

He’d been kind to her. His abrupt departure was not some intended cruelty, and the twist in her gut that she’d done something wrong somehow and that he wouldn’t come back again was easily smoothed away with the brush of his thumb over her brow, and a chaste kiss pressed to her mouth.

There had been no further visions of the reaper in the fields, ready to glean her soul from the body.

She’d slept, too. With no voices to disturb her, she’d woken well-past ten, groggy in the weak sunlight and bereft his absence.

The clouds were eager to swallow those faint sour beams of yellow by the time she’d tried the tub.

Rey couldn’t help but think the night might’ve ended differently had Ben’s obligations not drawn him back to Sarini Hollow and whatever awaited him in Snoke’s company.

She’d see him later.

Of that she was certain.

“Rey!” Poe’s greeting came from her left as she shouldered through the Gather House’s large doors. He brandished a pot of burnt-smelling coffee and an old carton of milk with crusted bits clinging to the lip. It dripped on his shoe. “What brings you by?”

Clamping her lips shut for a moment did nothing to stop his earnest consideration, nor the way he sobered the longer she stared.

She’d come for Chewie, of course — to contend with the inevitable reality that he’d gone missing and she didn’t have a damned clue how to begin. There weren’t enough bloody telephone poles in the entire county for the sort of missing persons signage she needed.

Actually saying the words, however, was proving difficult: given that she couldn’t get them past her teeth.

Spitting them out made them real.

Chewie’s gone missing. She heard herself say the words in her head, but she stalled again, flinching under Poe’s concern.

Finally, after he’d set down the pot and joined her in the hall, asking if he ought to get Leia, Rey shook he head.

“Take my office,” he said in low tones, gesturing to the room across the hall where another officer remained in profile, staring at a spot behind Poe’s desk.

She gave Poe a weak smile, thankful that he’d gathered that she had business with the Hanna police.

The young man waiting there wore a beaten leather jacket, his badge an afterthought that was clipped to his belt. She saw his number before he could offer his name: FN-2187, or Finn — the junior detective assigned to what appeared to be a murder board behind Poe’s desk.

“You must be Ms. Kenobi,” he greeted her.

“Rey,” she corrected, hesitating at his broad smile and warm, soft grip that engulfed her hand.

“I know who you are,” he said in low tones. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

Her breathing hitched, the sound cutting off before it could reach her lips. Staggered, the shock of it clipped her, setting her off-balance.

How had he known?

A startled look crossed his face, mortification following quick on its heels. “Oh, I’m — I didn’t mean to --“

Her chin crumpled, the thought of Chewie dead overriding all good and rational sense.

Sinking into the seat before Poe’s desk, Detective Finn fumbled, uncertain what to do with himself now that he’d tripped the flood gate.

“I didn’t realize you and your grandfather were close, I’m so sorry —” He snatched at a handful of tissues, tearing most of the deck from the box in a wad and offering them to her as a whole, while several drifted to the floor.

Rey hiccuped, gasped a breath, and laughed in desperation. Obi-Wan. Right. Her last known relative whose whereabouts could be confirmed.

There was no humour in it, but it put the officer at ease, at least.

“No,” she tried. “We weren’t. I’m here to report my dog missing,” she said, the world blurring into uncertain shapes. Fumbling her phone, she brought up the first picture she had of the small wooly mammoth.

“Oh.”

His hesitation stretched the moment out, turning it awkward. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood.”

“He’s a Malamute-Mastiff mix,” she said.

The detective regarded her with a mingling of empathy and pain.

He hazarded, “He’s as big as a bear?”

She nodded, emphatic. “Yes.”

“And he’s missing, but you thought --“

That he’d met with foul play. That some asshole out in Sarini Point was trying to scare her off her land, and they were resorting to dog napping to do it. She thought of Phasma, carrying along that pig’s carcass as if it was the sort of thing she did everyday. Rey imagined how much an animal like that might bleed, and wondered with prickling surety what they’d done with it all.

She thought of the flattened grass leading to the West field; the stains on her shoes and the spatters on the corn. Gripping the arms of her chair, her fingertips slowly losing feeling as she snapped together the disparate pieces: The dead pig. Her missing dog. Rey drew out the snapped collar, slapping it to Poe’s desk. Her jaw began hurting the harder she grit her teeth against the obvious: nothing had snapped the fibres. Someone had sliced it off and frayed the edges to make it look like something had torn it from Chewie’s neck.

Bracing herself, she squared her shoulders, pulled her hands into fists, and regarded Detective Finn with the ferocity of her conviction.

“Do you know what the Kenobi property valuation is set at, Detective Finn?”

To his credit, he shot a cautionary glance to Poe, who’d been detained by some other officer and was throwing curious looks their way from the hall.

Something about his soft features and wide eyes left her unwinding, but still, she held onto that threat of righteous fury that had brought her to the police in the first place.

“Two point five million dollars, Detective Finn — won by an outsider with no ties to Junari Point or its people. I think it’s safe to say that if there’s any resentment directed towards me, I’d have preferred that than at my dog.”

“Why do you think that?” he asked, perching on the corner of Poe’s desk.

“Look,” she began. “I came to Junari Point because Obi-Wan was the last member of my family whose whereabouts I knew of. He clearly knew where I was — or was at least able to find me, and yet he never reached out. The Mayor did.” She swallowed. “After he died. As far as I can tell he wanted nothing to do with me, despite not knowing me — and he definitely didn’t want me to come out here to visit him; to know who he was or how he was living.”

“Okay.”

“I still want to know,” she said. “I want to know who this man was; who my family were. Where they came from.”

“So, you stayed.”

A firm nod.

“And you’ve been searching the house for information.”

“I don’t think the locals expected me to stay on. I don’t think they though Obi-Wan had anyone left at all. From their comments, it sounds like they expected the land to go up for auction. And the house. Sell for cheap.” She wiped her mouth. “My showing up threw a real wrench into their plans, by the sounds of it.”

“This is hugely speculative,” the detective interjected.

She lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug, as if daring to challenge her — to say she was drawing conclusions where there oughtn’t be any.

“Has anyone made any threats towards you? Have they vandalized the property?”

She slumped a little, wanting, suddenly, to tell him about the voices in the corn; the rustling. The thing crashing towards her as all get-out in the attempt to terrify her. Scare her off.

Yet, she had no evidence of any of it.

She hadn’t even checked the field.

Red eyes along the roadside. LEDs could achieve that effect.

Rey opened and closed her mouth, feeling stupider by the moment to have heeded Ben’s warnings to avoid the crop at all costs.

It sounded weak even to her own ears: “It’s just a feeling I have.”

“Beyond your missing dog.”

“He is not --“ she began, then hissed, “I understand that people are less concerned about their pets in these parts, Detective. I understand that the relationship between humans and animals on a farm is a little different than where I’m from — but Chewie is like a person to me. He’s been a constant in my life since I was fourteen years old, and I will do my utmost to ensure he’s safe, fed, and cared for. He’s not a runner. He isn’t poorly behaved. He does not go wandering off like a puppy dog, chasing cars. He’s too bloody old for that.” She fumed. “He wouldn’t leave me in the middle of the night, and most importantly --“

Poe slipped in, arms folded across his chest, trailed by a concerned-looking mayor. Rey hardly glanced at them, her intent to bore it into Detective FN-2179’s skull that there was more to her missing dog than met the eye.

“He doesn’t have opposable thumbs.”

Both detectives raised their eyebrows, exchanging a glance that she didn’t appreciate. Rey slid to the edge of the seat, drawing herself up as the ratio of people standing to her diminutive slump became unbearable. “And if a dog doesn’t have opposable thumbs, explain to me how he could unlatch a backdoor and screen in the middle of the night to wander out into the corn field.”

Another glance exchanged. Poe cleared his throat.

“Do you have reason to believe something might’ve happened to him?”

She glowered, gesturing as if to ask if any of them had been paying any attention whatsoever.

“Yes.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but Rey interrupted:

“I found deliberate tracks flattening the grass into the west field yesterday morning — a smear of blood at the edge of the property, leading into the corn --“

“Did you follow the tracks further into the field?” Leia interrupted.

The peanut gallery was all ears today, it seemed.

The two detectives fell silent, drawing back to let the Mayor take a place between them. The appearance of concern slid into the knot of skin between her eyes, and it was a moment before Rey mistook it for shadows as she stepped in from the hall. The serenity of her contemplation was almost as unnerving.

“No.” Rey swallowed. “I thought it might be considered a crime scene, so I didn’t investigate any farther.”

The room fell still and silent for a long moment, with all eyes turned to her in a way that made her want to squirm out from the chair and hide under the desk.

She knew what they were thinking: Obi-Wan had crawled out there to die, too.

“We’ll send a car.” Poe nodded to Finn, as if dismissing him to the task. “Have there been any altercations with the townsfolk or —“

“No,” she admitted. “Just an overwhelming sense that I’ve somehow lost my way and found myself in this godforsaken place; that I’m not from here, and that I’m not welcome because I don’t know how things are done.”

She shrugged, offering a futile, helpless gesture with her hands. Wiping her palm sweat down the thighs of her jeans, she propped her chin on a knuckle and regarded Leia, who watched her back with that uncanny silence.

The detectives conversed silently, Finn sliding from his perch.

“Wait a second,” Poe called after him. “Ms. Kenobi --“

“Rey,” she corrected flatly.

“Rey, right.” He regarded her curiously. “Has anyone else been to the house besides you? Anyone around the field that ought not be in the time you’ve been there?”

Her hesitation might’ve been a giveaway, and surely under Leia’s watchful eye, the mayor could see her trying to shrink into her chair. A guilty glance in her direction might’ve been all the hellfire and damnation necessary to highlight the lie as she spoke the words:

“Just Snoke and his crew. They dropped off an industrial dumpster to help with gutting the house.”

And your son, she thought.

She turned away before Leia might spot the twin dots of pink rising in her face. Ben had walked the perimeter of the field, but he’d also been in every other room and her bed. There was likely trace evidence of him all over the place at this point, and as a thread of horror spindled through her as she realized the weight of the omission, Rey bit down on saying anything further.

By some mercy, neither officer commented on her flush. Poe only gave her a nod, and Finn was too busy agreeing with Poe’s instructions to check out the scene.

Too shrewd, Leia folded her hands together, lingering in the doorway. “Rey, animals go missing all the time. Sometimes, bigger animals… you know.”

She did know, buts he’d have none of it. “You don’t find it at all coincidental that there was fresh blood at nearly the same place where Obi-Wan broke through the corn? It was within feet of your police tape. I saw remnants in the field.”

The older woman hesitated.

“You haven’t ventured into the field, have you?”

It sunk like a plumb line, descending along with every bit of rationality that left her incredulous. By some mercy, she stopped herself from scoffing that she understood where Ben got it from. She went as far as to clack her jaw shut on the words as she sank back into her seat, appraising the older woman.

She thought of the eyes along the road the night before; thought about how she hadn’t willfully confessed what she’d seen to Ben either.

Concern kept the Mayor’s eyes hard, but when no other warning followed, Rey swallowed her mounting nerves.

Hafferkonigen.

Shit. Shit shit, Rey thought, searching the Mayor’s features for some sign that she knew more than she was letting on.

“I think —” she hedged, careful now. “I think that someone wants to lure me out there.”

Leia looked about ready to protest — to call her a foolish, headstrong child with a wild imagination, but if the mayor thought of any of it, she held back.

“Two nights ago, I heard someone — several someones — calling me from out there on the field. They woke me from sleep.”

“Did you go out there to meet them?” Leia pressed.

She frowned. “No, but I could report it as a disturbance?”

The wrinkles over Leia’s brow deepened.

“I didn’t see anyone,” she continued, leaving out the fact that she hadn’t exactly looked because it was easier to stay in bed, terrified. “There aren’t any lights, anyway -- I wouldn’t have seen anything.“ She licked her lips, continuing. “But I know what I heard. While I was cleaning out the cellar, it sounded like someone had come into the house yesterday. I heard the footsteps. Drove Chewie half out of his mind in the process, but when I came up, the house was empty and Chewie was starring at the west field — nose up against the screen, barking for all he was worth. Practically frothing.” Rey wiped her mouth. “Someone is messing with me. I’m certain of it.”

“Who?” she asked. “Who do you think would contrive to do any of this?”

Glancing at the detectives, Rey lowered her voice, “Snoke,” she said.

Leia’s eyebrows rose. “Snoke is an old man, my dear. He’s hardly spry enough to go traipsing through an untended corn field, trying to scare a young girl out of her rightful holdings.”

“He has friends,” she insisted. “I saw Phasma this very afternoon, dragging around a severed hog’s head — there was blood out on the entry to the west field, and I’m sure that if your police were to test it, it would be hog’s blood. Not a dog’s.”

“That doesn’t account for the fact that there is no good reason why he’d endeavour to scare you away. Or kidnap your dog while making you believe he was dead. Unless there’s something you’re not telling us.”

Rey narrowed her eyes. “I haven’t provoked them. I haven’t done anything other than show up, and try to clean up this mess Obi-Wan left behind.”

“But you’ve been asking questions,” Leia countered. “Sometimes that’s reason enough.”

She braced herself. “Right. Because nothing ever happens in small towns, right? Sometimes the locals need a little something to enliven them from their day to day — distract them from the drudgery of theirlives. And what difference does it make if it’s because of an outsider that they’re getting their kicks? It’s less of a consequence when someone’s just passing through. Your words, Mayor.”

Bristling, Rey stopped herself from asking Leia about the photograph she’d found, the woman’s eyes weary with age and the things she’d seen. For a moment, it seemed as if Mayor Organa wanted to clasp her hand — offer some sort of reassurance that whatever Rey was going through, it wasn’t forever. That was the problem: she was exhausted from wondering just how long she’d have to wait — her world stretched into an unending forever that didn’t understand the demarcations of time or age. It just trundled onward, leaving loose ends and unfinished business, and the possibility that eventually even hope would fail her while she remained waiting for the answers to questions she’d asked into that void without hope of being returned.

Some part of her worried that this was how it was always meant to be:

They would all leave her, and someday, it would only be Rey, again. Alone in the dark, waiting for echoes.

She grit her teeth, trying to stave off the creeping suspicion that she deserved less than that, even.

“Mayor Organa,” Poe said from the hall, interrupting.

A tense moment settled between them, Rey’s anger ebbing a little as it turned into shame. She swallowed, settling back. Leia wasn’t trying to provoke her, she realized —

“I’m only trying to encourage a little reason,” she said, standing. “There’s no apparent motive, Rey.”

“What about my land?” she countered. “What about my grandfather’s death? Isn’t there suspicion enough surrounding Kenobi House to warrant the consideration? To at least look into it?”

After a moment, Leia nodded. “We want to examine every possible avenue.”

“Doesn’t ‘examining every possible avenue’ also include the possibility that whatever happened to him happened for a reason? That the reason hasn’t gone away, even though he’s gone?” She sank back. “Some goddamned legacy to inherit. And where are we on that front, officer?” She fixed a glare at Poe, who, to his credit, only stiffened.

The Mayor glanced back, nodding. “You’re right, of course, but given that this is a police investigation —”

“We’ll take whatever information you’ll give us,” Poe supplied. “But unfortunately that doesn’t mean we can provide you with what we know in return. It’s a closed case, Ms. Kenobi. That doesn’t mean we’ve stopped searching for leads; it only means that we can’t divulge what we know with the public. Not even family.”

If they were waiting for a response, she had none.

“You can’t even assure me that you’ll find my dog,” she said, bitterness turning the words biting.

Detective Dameron’s smile was a little tighter at the edges as he closed the door on her with a, “We’ll just be a moment. Mayor?”

Leia looked back on her as she followed her officers into the hall, their shadows turning mottled and indistinct behind the frosted glass.

She slumped backwards, the chair creaking with the disturbance as she pressed her fingers to her temples in the spot where a headache was beginning to bloom.

Sometimes bigger animals — you know…

Rey shook her head, staring blankly past Poe’s desk.

She knew where Leia was leading with that: sometimes they wandered. Sometimes they got into things.

Rey blinked.

Focused.

Behind Detective Dameron’s desk was a whiteboard that had been but partially flipped to conceal its contents. Photos draped off the side used as a pinboard, along with a few newspaper clippings and several index cards. She stood, peering at the door assured that she was obscured from their sight, and certain that the door was closed, she eased around the desk and tilted the board so that it was fully upright.

Surprise caught her breath, her chest tightening reflexively with spreading numbness as the pieces of what she was seeing resolved into something her brain and eyes could translate:

True, they were working on Obi-Wan’s case — and here was the proof:

A series of photographs were laid out documenting not only his death, but another as well. A recent image caught her eye — not the newest, but the ten year separation between the last incident and her grandfather’s passing was too obvious to ignore. More, she couldn’t make sense of the splatters — only the machine’s blades, slicked with gore, made sense.

Little remained of the man in the photograph. The combine had seen to that.

“Shit,” she breathed, averting her eyes — the impossible contortions and the grey chunks littering the earth around him uncertain of their forms. She knew what they were. She knew one had toes, and another, fingers. Parts of them, at least.

Rey swallowed, her ears buzzing.

Thinking of Ben, she forced herself to look at the most recent crime scene photos, not recognizing the body in the corn field at all as she angled the board towards her.

He wasn’t named. Rather, Obi-Wan had been marked with a death date and a case number, and markers had been left on the ground around his body to indicate evidence.

She pulled a breath into her lungs, holding to the wall to support herself.

His flesh had been torn in places — bones lumped and at odd angles, and a little blood smeared him. Start on white and gristly against his pallor, she understood only a piece of the whole the longer she stared:

Carved into Obi-Wan’s chest was a mark, the flesh serrated in clean, deliberate lines as if it had been made with a knife. As if someone had used his skin to carve into like it was wood, or paper — the marks on the lintels in town, the marking on the cover of the ledger she’d found in the basement.

Why these men, she wondered? What could they possibly have had in common, the their deaths were part of the same, ongoing investigation?

Heaving breaths, Rey looked back to the door. She expected Detective Dameron wouldn’t be so charitable if he’d found she’d been snooping into his evidence.

Rey moved before her good senses could catch up to her body.

The board made a groan of protest, and with one last cautionary glance at the door, rifled through several dangling papers. A few sketches. A map bearing pins. With a closer glance, she noted the distances between the spots where Kenobi House stood and where Ben had discovered his father’s body. A newspaper clipping about the gruesome discovery that she lingered on a little too long dated to September in the 2000s, the voices in the hall growing closer.

Wide-eyed, his ears too big for his head, a teenaged Ben Solo scowled at the camera. His school picture, she surmised — a lost relic from his youth. In another, taken near the crime scene as indicated by the article’s headline, a younger-looking Snoke reached for the photographer’s lens while shielding the boy. The blurred features of his mother occupied the top, back corner of the frame.

Frowning, something about the image left her unsettled; maybe it was the way in which Snoke ushered him, appeared to protect him. She didn’t like it. Didn’t care for the look on the older man’s face one bit.

The voices behind the door grew closer, the forms darkening as they approached the glass.

Something else — she needed something else — some anchor to confirm her suspicions. She flicked through several papers hastily, sending a few fluttering like leaves to the floor. In a breath, they’d be under Poe’s desk.

“Shit,” she breathed, ignoring them.

She needed —

There.

Heart jackhammering, the symbol revealed itself between two telephone transcriptions — scribbled on a sheet of note paper was a familiar marking: five vertical lines in varying lengths, and a crescent with two horns facing upwards. Above it were two harsh dots that dented the paper with a ferocity that revealed the pegboard underneath.

Similar to the mark on the book, but it wasn’t exactly the same.

There were no indicators to what it meant, until she saw the black and white photograph of a hand. Severed at the wrist.

The same sigil had been scarred into the fleshy part of the palm.

More interestingly, it wasn’t fresh: the mark was a scar, long-made — clearly a mark born by the wearer for some years.

Han Solo? No.

There wasn’t much of him in the photographs, and looking again to make sure turned her stomach, but Han Solo still had both appendages. Mangled. Pulped, but the connection points remained. A sour taste filled Rey's mouth, her stomach creeping into her throat. She turned away, swallowing bile. Her ears felt over-filled with cotton, and desperate, she heaved a breath, and then another. She checked the other photos.

Not Obi-Wan's either, its seemed.

Wiping at her forehead, she eased from behind the board, setting it at the same off-angle and not entirely caring if it looked as it had when she’d discovered it. Heart pounding, she sank back into the chair, her eyes on the door and knowing that there were worse things at work in Junari Point than a few miscreant townsfolk, trying to scare her off.

Her throat closed, her eyes burning at the thought of Chewie out there somewhere — somehow, not knowing what had happened to him made it that much worse.

Her heel began ticking, her fingers clutching the arms of the chair, trying to get the muzzy feeling in her head to clear. It felt like ants marching across her skin in waves.

The door opened, and looking guilty, Detective Finn slipped back into the room — throwing a cautious glance into the hall behind him. He forced a smile, and in two strides, crouched beside her. Pressed something into her hand, letting the paper crumple. If he noticed the sheen of cold sweat dotting her forehead, or the overly-slick wetness of her palms, he didn't remark on it.

Under his breath, quickly, he whispered, “It’s not much, but if you can’t find what you’re looking for in that house — try here instead.” He looked over his shoulder. “Strictly speaking this could be considered inside information, but as a harmless suggestion for a research project — family trees? History? That's what you've been looking for, right?”

Her heart hammered her ribcage. Looking down at a scrap of paper that might’ve been pulled from a ticket pad, she saw a few characters of an address.

“They only have old technology. Newspaper records on microfiche and the like, but it’s better than nothing -- maybe you’ll discover something unexpected with the right sort of digging. This place —” He shook it’s head. “This county is old. Old families. Old settlements. Old blood working the soil. Lots of history in a place like this.” He nodded, standing. “But the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

He hardly spared a glance at the board, but when he did, he lingered only a moment as if he’d expected nothing less.

“Be careful,” he warned, giving her fingers a squeeze around the note before the door clicked open again, admitting Detective Dameron, now wearing a pinch between his eyebrows. He spared a glance for Finn. A nod.

Officer Finn straightened.

Rey tucked the note into her palm, not daring ask why. A flash of matching lines cut into flesh. Her gaze dropped to the Officer's hands. His forearms. No visible markings that she could see.

She looked away, skittish and unsure.

“We’re going to send a squad car out to the property a little later to check things out. See to the field,” said Poe. “Meantime, the mayor would like to have a few words, if you can spare the time.”

Her heart racketed against her ribs. “Sure.”

The thought that Obi-Wan and Han Solo’s deaths were related lingered, nattering at her with insistent thoughts that tugged her attention back to the board behind her. Rey swallowed, shuttering her gaze before she could give herself away. The photograph in the ledger was proof her grandfather and Han Solo had been close, but there remained something else afoot: some other bond between them, and others in town who hadn’t come forward. She just wasn’t sure what forged it.

It might’ve been the illegal moonshine operation, but having heard Ben’s assessment of his father’s reputation, it was also possible that Obi-Wan had been helping him in some way. Perhaps their fates had become entangled because of it.

Perhaps there was more to the story than met the eye — at least as far as Hanna City’s authorities would tell her.

Leia lingered in the door a little longer than necessary before claiming the empty seat beside hers. The older woman fell to thoughtful silence.

“It was your grandfather’s wish to be buried in the small cemetery on the outskirts of Junari Point. It’s not church ground. He was specific about his ties — or his lack thereof — with any formal religion, but the place is nice. Quiet. Nestled into a small outcrop of trees on the outskirts of the Sarini Fell,” she began.

“The forest?”

She nodded, her attention elsewhere. “It’s just past Ault Sawmill Road. On the right,” she said, as if offering instruction. “Opposite the Hollow.”

When the Mayor looked up, a fleeting but pointed look skirted her expression, drawing the lines around her mouth into a fine pucker that sucked her cheeks down the the skeleton. It wasn’t comical. Rather, Rey found the shrewdness unnerving — as if Leia knew that Rey knew exactly who lived out there; had been there herself; had kissed him only last night in her own bed after crying on his couch when she’d run to him after —

She shook it off, turning away, her skin prickling with keen familiarity.

Unsticking her tongue from the roof of her mouth, she managed, “I thought he’d been buried; my grandfather.”

Someone cleared their throat from beyond the sliver of opened door.

“Do you have something to add to this private conversation, Detective Dameron?”

Folding her hands across her chest, Rey hardly flicked a glance in his direction.

“Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t sound it. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but since this is my jurisdiction —”

“Out with it, Detective.”

Rey considered his look of discomfort.

“We thought his next of kin might at least want the last opportunity to say goodbye, but in this case, given the circumstances…”

The blood drained from her face. She felt it as it departed, leaving her lightheaded. Rey sank into the empty chair beside Leia, looking to the woman for confirmation.

“Do you want me to --“ she tried. “I didn’t know him. I never met the man.”

“You’re not obligated to identify the body,” Poe explained. “We know it’s Obi-Wan.”

It didn’t placate her.

“But since you’re his last living relative -- we wanted to wait before we set him to rest. He specified that he didn’t want an open casket funeral. He didn’t want a ceremony at all.”

She’d never get a chance to see him for herself. They didn't want her to see him in the state he'd been left, and judging by the photographs on the murder board, Rey knew exactly why.

From a distance, she heard herself agree. Felt her head bob in a nod.

Obi-Wan remained her only family, and if this is how she might know him for at least a few moments, she could offer her respects before they buried him —

She heard herself agree that she’d be there at two, and would follow the processional to the cemetery though it would only be her car and the hearse. She would see him buried. She would see Obi-Wan at rest.

As she left their murmurings behind, heavy footfalls dragging as she descended the steps of the Gather House to the Falcon that Ben had repaired for her, she recalled Leia’s first words to her about her grandfather:

No one knew what he’d been doing out there in the West field of his property. No one knew what had befallen him, to leave him running alone and naked in the dark, lacerations decorating his body amidst other markings — markings deliberately carved into his skin.

She wondered if the promise that he’d gone very, very crazy was only a partial truth:

That there wasn’t something more hidden between old photographs and ancient markings that someone didn’t want her to find.


	16. Scythe

Nothing good comes from digging into the past, of course -- even in small towns where it seems like nothing happens. Back on the street, her feet leading her to the car — Rey lingered, trying to place what felt so different about Hanna City’s annex:

The sun, perhaps. Glints of buttercup light peeked through the clouds, leaving the streets kissed with dusty haze. Reluctant to leave, she did, a crumpled note in her hand left to her by one Detective Finn, who would be dutifully inspecting her yard by now — if not the field behind the house.

On the piece of paper was an address, and Junari Point was underlined. Frowning at it, she noted that he hadn’t labelled where he was sending her, only leaving a cryptic message and the furtive hope that some will goose chases ended in rainbows or pots of gold.

The sun diminished as soon as she sat in the driver’s seat of the Falcon, her mood failing along with the light.

The drive back into town was uneventful, though the car captured the attention of more milling townsfolk than she’d seen in the days since her arrival. They emerged from the fields, the small houses that skirted the side streets and offshoots behind main — Junari’s streets alive now that they crossed in front of her, forcing her to slow to a creep. They carried packages and baskets, plastic bags and sack cloths. Some unloaded hay from a tractor pull, humming in the street as she passed with guttural determination to continue working. Others carried crates with spartan offerings — fruits, breads, a few stunted vegetables.

It felt as if they were getting ready for a party that she wasn’t invited to.

They stared, of course. Most of them stopped what they were doing entirely to look; to whisper behind their hands.

Some pointed.

A little girl waved, a corn dollie dangling from dirty fingers.

Rey stared straight ahead, taking the turn off to the street Finn indicated at a crawl to avoid colliding with anyone. A creeping sensation prickled from the base of her skull in a straight march down her spine. She rolled her shoulders, trying to ease it, but the feeling of being watched lingered as she slowed the car.

A large, redbrick building with dingy columns supporting a tapered frieze that had seen better days revealed itself to be the town’s library. Someone had changed the words on the placard out front, rearranging the letters and adding some hand-scrawl of their own:

What might’ve once been a invitation to “Make America Great Again” had become a far more ominous proclamation that America was just fine, thank you very much.

“Microfiche,” she muttered, echoing what Finn had said, rubbing the goosebumps down her arms.

Finn sent her to the town archives.

He might as well have given her a shovel and told her to start digging.

The problem was that she wasn’t entirely certain what she was looking for.

Huffing a breath, she sat back, listening to the ticking engine as she turned the key on the Falcon, and took one glance at the rearview — half expecting something unnerving to be waiting for her there, standing in the middle of the street and watching with the attentiveness of someone spectating someone else doing something they shouldn’t — like a shoplifter in a store.

The feeling that she didn’t belong lingered, but there was no one behind her. Those townsfolk that lingered on main had turned their attention to other things: their preparations for whatever it was they were doing.

Harvest. Right.

She ducked into the library, following a hand-written sign with a little arrow pointing to the basement that said the archives were below the building proper, and didn’t stop at the librarian’s desk. It was empty, besides.

The door to the sub-level was missing, the electric lights humming static crackles. She emerged into a clean but musty-smelling room with a single wood table at its centre, hemmed in on all sides by low steel cabinets bearing alpha numerical codes. A peek inside revealed white boxes, no larger than her hand. The first read “J-K, 1987”. A moss-coloured microfiche machine sat against the wall.

She eyed it warily, tracking her fingers over the dates as she ventured deeper into the catalogues. The next drawer she opened had publication details printed on the tops, and finding that she’d come across a. Collection of newspaper articles, she crouched, finding the general dates she needed:

Thirty years prior, local news. She dragged a couple of boxes into her lap, flipping the lid to find a collection of film slides tucked away neatly. Holding one to the light, she understood a bit better what she was looking for:

The machine acted as an enlarger, and the series of rectangles on each card contained the news articles and documents that she’d need to sort through. One at a bloody time.

Rey exhaled, feeling suddenly heavier than she had in days.

Another glance at Finn’s paper didn’t help at all. He’d left her no clues, and no indication where she needed to start looking. She checked her phone again, and was again greeted with a dire lack of bars. She doubted this place even had dialup, and not knowing which was more torturous — digging through the archives as Finn suggested, or struggling with a fourteen bit modem that would drop her connection at the slightest prompting. She doubted the _Hanna Tribune_ even had a website, much less a digital branch for their imprint.

An errant thought tugged at her as hopelessness settled on her shoulders: something had happened to her parents. Something no one wanted her to know, much in the way they didn’t want her rifling around through the near-distant past to uncover what had happened to her grandfather and his —

“Friends,” she breathed, an idea sparking.

She looked at the box in her hands, glancing at the date again, and thrusting it back into its proper place in the drawer. Running her fingers down the series, she guessed that Ben must be about her age, which meant that if Han had died when he was fourteen, that was likely within a range of ten years, at best.

“Two thousand what --“ she murmured to herself, recalling the newspaper clipping from the murder board in Detective Dameron’s office. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember the masthead to at least narrow the publication, but she’d been thrown by the gruesome images of Ben’s father.

Flitting past the larger publications, she dragged out three drawers’ worth of boxes and hauled them to the machine. Turning it on wasn’t an issue. She even figured out how to insert the slides as it hummed at her, smelling faintly of ancient things, the cards like plastic moth wings that wouldn’t cooperate when she tried to fit them into the viewing area.

The first images were a black and grey blur, remaining that way until she flapped her hand over a few knobs on the side, learning to dial the images back into clarity with a few sharp cranks.

She sat back, regarding the screen with no small sense of victory, and proceeded to teach herself how to snap through to the next article.

Grinning to herself, she scanned the first few articles, and finding nothing save reports of a few scant county fair victories and an unseasonable drought that had lasted several months already. Mentions of foreclosure in Hanna City impacting the smaller towns in the county.

She stopped, thinking for a moment and parsing her feelings — this was the right track, wasn’t it?

It felt right, she thought. It felt like this was the direction she was meant to take; where Finn had pointed her.

She frowned at a new series of bland reports about a stray cow, and best practices in scarecrow construction. A recipe for boysenberry pie that won first prize two counties over. Her hope flagged.

This was the right track.

Wasn’t it?

Local news. Weather reports. Nothing so dramatic as an accident, or a murder. Nothing so scandalous.

Something bad had happened to Chewie, she was certain of it — something in the same unsavoury flavours of bad that had happened to Han Solo and Obi-Wan. The question was what — if such a sleepy, insular town as Junari Point could be intent to cover it up, hiding it from their news reports altogether.

A yawn threatened as she switched to the next box of slides.

Rubbing her eyes, she danced through the next array, and the next, her eyes blurring as more of the same nothingness cropped up over years. Soon enough, she’d reached the spring of 2005, and while despair crept in to sit at her feet, lashing at her nerves occasionally like a cat’s tail, her thoughts drifted:

It wasn’t impossible that Snoke would try to scare her off. Thinking of Hux and Phasma’s hungry responses when she’d first met them, after admitting who she was and where she was headed had been enough of a tell, but even Ben had tried to warn her off. Maybe he’d known, then, what Snoke was plotting all along — maybe he knew more about Obi-Wan’s death than he’d let on.

She picked up the screen of her phone, glancing at the time with a frown, and moved on to the summer and autumn harvest seasons of the same year, finding mentions of the previous incarnations of the festival that preoccupied the townsfolk, but no untimely deaths.

Her frown deepened.

She’d been so sure — the marks on Obi-Wan’s body, the secretive behaviour of the townsfolk; it was one thing to be uncomfortable when a stranger showed up in town, but outright hostility would earn prosecution.

Her heel began ticking.

There was something that wasn’t add up:

A motive, Poe had said. She needed a motive beyond the obvious fact that Spoke was interested in her land. That Ben was interested in her body, and protecting it by her best guess, left her at odds with the picture Man had painted of the boy:

Where was the angry, murderous teenager who’d fallen to Snoke’s whims?

She shook her head, her thoughts drifting to how he’d stalked out the field behind Kenobi House, an air of command about him that sent a thrilling ripple down her spine. She shivered. The way he’d become best friends wth Chewie in a matter of moments; how he’d climbed the trellis just to ensure she’d arrived home in one piece after fixing and dropping off her car.

It didn’t make sense.

She thought of his mother, her thoughts snagging on the marks left in the ledger, sitting on her nightstand. A similar mark to those left on the bodies of Ben’s father, and her grandfather.

Her nails drummed a rhythm on the desk, her head bowed as she thought over the photograph, an itch beginning between her eyes that she couldn’t scratch:

Familiarity tickled — a link struggling to bridge the divide of her understanding.

The photograph, Rey realized, looking up.

“Hafferkonigen,” she breathed, recalling the word written on the back and how close it was to the name Snoke .

Turning away from the microfiche, she found what she was looking for almost immediately.

“Under ‘H’.”

Nearly knocking over the chair in her haste, she grabbed the following five years’ worth of boxes marked with “H” as an alphabetical classification, loading 2006 and skimming to the autumn season directly.

Hafferkonig. Hafferkonigen. Masculine and feminine versions of the same name —

She flicked through the articles so quickly, she nearly breezed right by it: September 2007, just before Junari Point’s harvest festival, the headline read, “The Oat Queen passes her sceptre.”

Barking a laugh of triumph, she adjusted the viewing knob, bringing to clarity what had been blurry before: In the accompanying photo, an older woman and a younger woman with a similar resemblance stood in the town square, flanked by bales of hay and crates teeming with bound grains.

Rey read the article, and though she recognized neither person, the message was clear:

The festival had a symbolic ruler who presided over the festivities, and this year, the duty had befallen Ben.

Hafferkonig. “Oat King,” she translated.

Just like there had been Oat Queens before him, the townsfolk didn’t seem to fuss too much over who accepted the honour — male or female. It appeared to change every few years, as there were a litany of previous Kings and Queens honoured by name a little further down the article. Leia Organa had the honour in 1992.

And that meant that in the time before Ben had been born, Leia had participated in the ritual passing of the torch. But not an _actual_ passing of the torch, it seemed — not for the men.

She read under her breath, “‘As many Junarians know, our harvest celebration culminates at the equinox when the day and night are of equal length. We invite you to join us for the parade from the central square on Main through Sarini Fell for the culmination of our observances as dusk falls on the even when the summer court and winter courts meet not in enmity, but as friends for one last revel before the change of seasons to see the wheel of the year turn. A play will conclude the evening, as the Oat King and Holly King meet to decide the victory of winter over summer in heart-stopping battle. Refreshments will be provided.”

Rey sat back.

Theatrics, she figured — the whole thing was pageantry.

Swallowing with difficulty, she wrestled with it a moment.

Wasn’t it?

There couldn’t be an actual battle — the whole thing had to be symbolic. No one was getting killed for sport without the good officers of Hanna City knowing about it, especially if they were publicizing it.

She read on.

One King, it seemed, defeated the other to assume his rightful place as ruler. Suspicion nagged at her, in spite of the obvious metaphors.

Rey frowned, tracing the names. Far fewer kings than queens, she noted.

Obi-Wan was not amongst them.

Neither was Han Solo.

Okay, she thought, blowing out a breath.

She scrolled back to Leia’s name, forging a connection:

She’d been pregnant in the photograph where she crowned Oat Queen. Ben was born in 1993, and if he’d been fourteen at the time of Ben Solo’s passing —

Rey flew from her chair, scrabbling for the correct box of microfiche articles from September 2008. Barking a laugh, she stripped the sheet from the reader, her fingernails flicking thorough the collection with a rapidity that made her heart skip, but as she crossed from August to October, she halted.

Pulling both sheets, she searched the others around it in case September had been misplaced.

“What the fuck,” she said aloud.

Dumping the entirety of the box out on the desk in front of her, she pushed the collection around, searching, but not finding the right set of dates that might’ve described Han Solo’s tragic ends.

“What the actual _fuck_.”

A blank spot.

A deliberately missing set of days.

It was as if someone had extracted those articles, and given the age and relative obscurity of the pages, it certainly seemed that no one had come looking for them recently.

Checking August, October, and November just to be certain, she learned that though the harvest was particularly poor that year, it was apparent that all traces of Han Solo’s death had been removed from the archive. Wiped, as it were, with the efficiency of a five finger lift.

Considering the mess before her, she shook her head with numb fascination, though her mind whirred.

The thought that she ought to call Leia and reveal her findings crossed her mind, but one glance at the absent bars on her cellphone set her packing — hastily cramming the collection of microfiches as best she could back into their respective boxes. She raced to jam them back into their appropriate spots, her mouth dry with the knowledge that someone had been there before her, and that individual had gone out of their way to clean up after themselves.

She found the payphone outside, digging through her pockets with a fury, and finding only holes. Success was found in the glove box, but all the response she got from the Hanna City Gather House was a busy signal.

Hanging up, she collected her quarter, and with her eyes on the people milling about Main behind her, their preparations for this years’ Harvest well-underway, she wondered who the crowned king would battle this year — who might win if Ben Solo stood alone.

That there was more happening in Junari Point than she cared to know was obvious; more going on than what the town cared for her to know — clearly, more than Ben might be willing to confess to, because living here made him party to it. All signs pointed to Ben’s reluctant participation in whatever Snoke and his cronies had planned.

A sick knot settled in her stomach when she considered that disposing of any outside interest might be part of it; that Chewie might’ve fallen victim to something more than a simple dog-napping to get her gone. They didn’t like outsiders, that much was clear — and from her perspective, it felt as if Han and Obi-Wan might’ve suffered similar treatment. Neither man was born of Junari soil, but they’d both settled in town and stayed long enough to outdo their welcome.

She glanced down at her hands, her fingers trembling a little with the possibility that someone might try to do to her what they’d done to Han and Obi-Wan; that there was more than a few ceremonial rights of inversion happening during the harvest festival.

If that were true — then what had happened to her dog?

Heart pounding, Rey realized there was one surefire way to find out.

The engine turned over with barely a sputter of complaint; Ben’s handiwork proving a godsend that she’d need to thank him for later.

She drove towards Kenobi House, crawling through the crowd gathered at the town square in the mid-afternoon haze, their burlap and masks in bundles carried in their arms.

Only the children were dressed for ceremony — their small faces turning to her with interest, but in their places, she saw the hollowed eyes of a mouse, a fox, a rooster; animal masks, made from paper mâché and painted in dull colours, child-sized and eerily too early for Halloween.

Did they celebrate Halloween out here?

She couldn’t be sure.

In the town square, two figures were erected beside a section of hay bales that had been constructed to resemble an overly large chair. On the right, a straw-stuffed dummy garbed in rain-stained cream — the fabric of its robes tattered but homespun, a cotton or linen or some sort that had seen a few years’ exposure to the elements. The other was garbed in sun-bleached black. Speeding up as she realized the weapon they’d outfitted him with, she regarded the dull sheen on the blade and realized that the scythe was no prop — the blade was real, and someone had rigged it so that it appeared ready to swing in a downwards arc towards the defending king in white. The first sign of animal bone beneath the hood of that grey, looming shadow in the review view a promise of worse things to come. Children played around the statues, tumbling at their feet, their screams shrill under darkening skies.

Rey gripped the wheel a little tighter.

Turning off onto the country road towards home, she decided that it was entirely possible the townsfolk might’ve hurt Chewie — their unusual customs fodder for thought for later. At that moment, her one concern was for what awaited her in the west field behind Kenobi House; what lingered out there where she’d been too afraid to follow.

Ben’s warning’s be damned. She’d never know what had happened to her dog unless she ventured into their field to see for herself.

“Hafferkonig,” she whispered, reminding herself that there were things to fear in Junari Point — Snoke’s claws in Ben Solo’s skin being one of them.


	17. Corn Field

Kenobi House sat stoic against the fields, the corn’s unruly conference a hush of whispers that seemed intently directed at her — that she might hear the things said in the language of the grain; some archaic tongue that wanted nothing of the living that encroached on the lands, but were perfectly fine sharing secrets with itself. Desolate and alone, the crop waved as she approached, old shadows and rain stains turning the windows black from the inside of the house; its solemn contemplation little more than the quiet before a dirge.

Rey stood in its shadow, less concerned for the decades it stood sentinel before the fields — a watchtower and bastion against the night when its lights were lit.

A thought skittered, rodent-like and intent to go unseen though she searched for it, squinting:

Something here she should know better.

Something that stared back the harder she searched for an answer to a question she couldn’t give voice to:

Who am I, she’d asked herself — maybe the question she might’ve asked was who was Obi-Wan?

Her feet moved of their own volition, carrying her across the porch with the burgeoning sense that not all was right in the small town her grandfather once called home; that no matter how she tried, she couldn’t manager to reconcile the conclusion that he might’ve known her if he’d tried, but either madness or indifference had kept him away. Other possibilities blossomed too — that perhaps he hadn’t wanted her to come to Chandrilla County; that the life he led here had been his alone and whatever messes he’d made he mightn’t have managed to tidy enough to welcome someone else home.

Maybe that’s how he wanted it.

And yet, her skin prickling with uncanny certainty that there was more she didn’t know yet, Rey approached the field through the house, pushing her way towards it down the hall in an uninterrupted line that left her legs tingling with disconnect from her body. Numb from the chest down, she thought only of her sweet companion through all the hard times, and how fear of the impossible had driven her from the home that she might now call hers if only she could face its secrets.

She found her courage in the knife block, drawing a dulled kitchen knife with a muted sound against the drawer where it cut into pitted wood.

Whatever lingered out there was not meant for her.

Rey knew this: she understood it with the surety that, pushing past the back door screen, she regarded the field with a coldness that touched something in her she’d known but had not seen in herself — something that existed only in glimpses when she turned too quickly, the feeling that something lingered outside the periphery of her vision; the sense that she knew that somehow, something lingered in the darkened slivers beneath the bed, and in the ichor of a childhood closet.

She might’ve known it as her childhood fears, or she might’ve known it for her shadow: the darkened part of herself that was not afraid of what a few contrary townsfolk might do if she opposed them.

She approached the field, dry grass hushing against her sneakers, knowing that the feeling of being watched redoubled the closer she got:

This field was hers now, and those that trespassed against her would suffer the consequence.

No warning. No quarter.

She eyed the wall of corn, walking the hedgerow with her heart slamming her ribs, her shoulders set, listening for something _other_ to reconcile between the rustling stalks — something that didn’t belong that she was meant to cut out.

Where she thought she’d seen blood and broken stalks the day before, she now found spatters of mud kicked up against the broken sheaves — a path of shattered plants leading into the west field at a jagged lean; pitched in different directions than intended. The house loomed at her back, dispassionate but observing her intentions with cold acceptance, as if it had any feelings towards her whatsoever.

She was an interloper, as far as the townsfolk would have her believe.

Rey had other ideas as she ducked her head, thinking only fleetingly of Ben Solo’s warning as she crossed the divide between the field and the lawn, thoughts of her missing dog, her dead grandfather, and the leering, penetrating scrutiny of the people who left her feeling small and unwanted.

A muted hush fell around her, dampening the distant sounds of Junari Point — the preparations in the distance as the townsfolk preoccupied themselves with whatever festival preparations interested them. Rey only heard the corn, blotting out all reason as it closed around her, falling like a curtain across the world.

Ben had warned her against coming out here — Ben, she now realized, who was a little afraid of what would happen to her if she did.

Rey braced herself, taking a few more steps until the gables of Kenobi House vanished, following the battered line of police tape that had fallen from where it might’ve been placed as markers, indicating the path taken by Obi-Wan.

Had Finn come out to inspect the area yet, she wondered?

No signs that anyone else had been through here lingered, though she searched with untrained eyes for some sign that her dog had also taken this path.

Gripping the knife as if her arm were the hilt of a scythe, she slashed away at the errant stalks that occupied her path, clearing the way for herself now that she found booted footprints in the earth, the crops trampled by many feet. Crime scene investigators, policemen, coroners.

Logical answers.

She needed pragmatic realism and concrete logic to make sense of it, though part of her strained to hear or see something more in the low light:

Whispers coalescing into words she might recognize — voices that might call her name.

She glanced over her shoulder, a light breeze lifting the hair on the back of her neck, making her shiver.

The corn closed around her, walling off the rest of the property, blotting out everything but the steel sky overhead.

It seemed to breathe with purpose, the crop alive and interested in this interloper that dared trespass in its realm. No eyes stared back at her — no red dots winking to life in the shades between the furrows; not a rustle amongst the stalks that would suggest something otherworldly lay in wait. Regardless, the sense of isolation redoubled; the feeling of being watched an ever-present weight that rested between her shoulder blades like a hand, pushing her forwards.

“Chewie?” she called. Even her voice seemed muffled, the sound swallowed by the field.

It wasn’t that she expected to find him out there, but some dim hope remained that he’d only gotten lost. She clung to it like a lifeline, even as she moved deeper into the rows, skipping over furrows and ducking through the threshed stalks that split wide where others had come before her in a meandering path that veered sharply left.

A few plastic numbers remained trampled into the ground. She lingered on these, the evidence long removed. It occurred to her that the police had found remnants here from Obi-Wan’s death — that she was moving closer to the site where his body had been found.

Her breathing loud in her ears, she scoured the wall of corn for some further indication of a struggle. The earth, too: she searched for paw prints, besides.

It was impossible that something had carried Chewie off, she decided. Not without a significant struggle, and beyond the initial mess on the lawn she’d mistook for blood, she hadn’t found any signs of injury — at least not bleeding.

A faint, morbid thought rose, then: that someone might’ve snapped his neck.

Anger bubbled in her chest, and she rose with muddy knees, regarding her surroundings anew:

“Hello?” she called loudly, knowing nothing would answer back and not being able to help herself.

Determined not to be bested by superstition, she pushed the lingering image of Ben approaching the field from her mind; sharpened by focus and seeing or hearing things she couldn’t; telling her to get back into the house as if something lingered beyond her attention that might hurt her too.

Rey didn’t believe in field spirits. At least, that’s what she told herself.

She doesn’t believe in the story told about the harvest either; not the one that involved the man himself, and not the portrayal she’d found at the town square — a portent, perhaps, of whatever was to come for Ben Solo. That he’d been brainwashed to believe his role in this backwater’s drama left her on edge, the thought that he might actually believe that there was something out here worth worrying about left her cold.

If Rey’s suspicions were right, the only thing to fear out in the west field of the Kenobi property were the townsfolk who’d hidden among the furrows in the effort to scare her off. With renewed determination, she crashed forward, following the meandering trail of destruction and hacking at anything in her way — intent on finding some indicator that what she believed was correct:

That whatever fate had befallen both Obi-Wan and Han Solo had been contrived to look like some sort of ritualistic offering. The marks on their bodies. The blood on the field. Murder was murder, plain and simple — it didn’t matter why or how, but she knew, in some dark corner of her psyche, that Snoke was behind the deaths. All she needed was proof of the fact because a hunch and a suspicion wasn’t enough to stop the man before he did it again.

And she knew, that if she sat back and let it happen, Snoke would drag Ben Solo to his ends to fulfill some blood sport — 

Out here, the corn grew so high that it reached four feet overhead, blotting out bits of the sun.

Dwarfed by it, she took the left path when it forked, driving deeper into the field as a noise rose from behind her, to her right. Rey stopped, the sound disappearing with the crunch of her sneakers over so many broken stalks. She waited, ears straining, holding her breath.

She rationalized that LED lights could have been strung through the field and turned on in the evening to simulate the presence of eyes in the field. Christmas lights, even. Anyone might’ve stood in the field at night, hidden by the sheer height of the crop, and called to her with disembodied voices.

A snap sounded from her left this time, and Rey whipped around, brandishing the kitchen knife.

“Who’s there?” she demanded. “Show yourself.”

Silence returned to her.

Heart thrumming, she inched sideways, trying to peer through the empty spots between the stalks, determined to see who followed her — who had the gall to come onto her land, threaten and scare her.

“I’m armed,” she warned, the threat a promise that wove into her words.

A crash from the opposite side made her jump, her feet tangling over themselves as the tops of the corn bowed and swayed, whipping in a frenzy. The rumble of an animal accompanied it, low and guttural, a harsh, grinding sound that cut through her hesitation like a saw.

“Chewie?” she breathed.

Snapping, rending, tearing. The harsh clack of jaws biting together, wanting to snap bone.

No man could make a sound like that.

And Chewie would _never_ —

Stumbling, she fumbled backwards, watching the bow and sway of the corn towards her. It came from nowhere — as if collecting to solidity in one spot, now honing in on her.

She turned into a staggering run — at first following the maze-like twine of the path made by Obi-Wan and the police, and then thinking better of it to throw it off her, Rey flung herself into the thick wall of the furrow walks beyond it.

A razored snarl from behind her grazed over her understanding that no animal could make such a sound, and with her blood rising to a crescendo scream in her veins, she ran, arms pumping, leaves slapping at her as she threw herself forward, barely sparing a glance over her shoulder. Cornsilk snagged at her limbs, turning her arms sticky, while the stalks slapped and slashed at the places where her flesh remained exposed. Gasping, her face stinging, the knife caught and ripped away from her, falling from her fingers with a gasp of despair. Turning to look after it, the sway of the crop behind her as the creature neared, crushing everything before it.

Rey couldn’t see it, but she felt each footfall’s reverberation through the soil.

“Shit,” she breathed, cutting right, the blur of green and desiccated gold lashing at her as she ducked into to run, shouldering forward.

Where was she?

Where was the house?

With the corn so high over her head, she’d lost her orientation: the path was gone, the field devouring her the deeper she ran without direction.

Fear soured in her stomach, the air in her lungs turning glacial as she stumbled, listing sideways as the soft earth dragged at her ankles. Spikes of pain from each breath hit her lungs hot and turned cold on the exhale. Her legs burned then lost feeling. She saw blood on her palms over fresh lashes, the corn whipping her over and over. She staggered to a halt, listening.

Silence from behind her. Silence from all sides. Only her breathing echoed in shuddering irregularity, loud in her ears as she turned on the spot, trying to find where the sound had stopped. Her lungs burned. Her heart would surely lurch to a stop in her chest. Her vision swam with spots in her panic.

Where was it?

Had she lost it?

Feldgeister, Snoke had said. Spirits of the field. Corn demons:

Able to manifest in any space because they had no bodies.

Her convictions wavered, and she thought only of Ben’s staunch warning for her to get back in the house. Don’t go into the field. Don’t follow the voices when they call.

Whatever stalked her now had no mind for the cautions he’d given her.

Rooted, she turned on the spot, catching and holding her breath, blood pounding in her ears. Cold spread from her spine through her extremities the longer she waited, crouching and hoping that she went unnoticed by whatever it was that stalked her.

She’d expected Hux, hiding out here. She’d expected Phasma making efforts to scare her by convincing her of the supernatural.

Straining, she waited, making herself small, her gaze flicking between the subtle motions of the grain, the effort to see something between the stalks whose form she wasn’t certain of — not a person, that much she felt in her bones as surely as she knew her own name.

The air thickened in anticipation, making it hard to breathe.

A shape caught and held her attention: a blot of darkness the color of black earth, still and standing yards to her left. Maybe it was only a shadow, she reasoned; a hulking mound of ichor left from the tilling season, still where the grain swayed around it, obscuring it from view.

Overhead, the sky remained an opaque grey blanket, thick with rainclouds that refused to break. The corn whispered around her, promising comforts she’d never been entitled to.

“You’re not real,” she whispered, the sound loud in her own ears.

Without voices, without actual words, the corn rustled as if laughing.

The snap and barrel of breaking corn as it shot left left her heart lurching, and Rey staggered, crashing away with her heart in her throat — knowing with all certainty that this was it: this was the end. This is where she would make her last stand, and this is how she was going to die.

A guttural rumble not unlike thunder over some far off field swept through her, the sound earthbound and consuming, grazing her nerves and turning her blood electric.

“Not real,” she hissed, but she didn’t stop running as tears streamed from the corners of her eyes.

The corn lashed at her, cuts opening on the bared skin of her arms, beating at her thighs and ribs, hard enough to bruise as she forgot the path entirely: forgot any semblance of control or direction and just ran.

She lost a sneaker.

She thought she might lose control over her bladder as the sound roiled from behind her, the fog of some creature’s breath spilling through the furrows with the overly sweet scent of decay.

She thought of the deer’s head in the fridge.

She thought of flies.

She thought of how she was just so much meat and bone.

Turning backwards only once, she found nothing at all behind her. Short, panicked breaths choked her as she turned, willing herself forward despite the sting of sweat in her wounds where she wiped at her face, certain that she hadn’t been alone a moment before.

Nearly weeping outright, she turned on the spot, finding herself in a small, beaten down clearing, and screaming for the first time, she slapped her hands to her mouth to staunch the sound at the shape before her:

Once a man, now the ragged strips of clothes hung lank from limbs trussed to a cross. His head bowed, a hat fell over his face. Rey took in the jagged red smile and black eyes, the pieces of a limp body strung with twine and wire impossible and whole before her.

It smelled sweeter: hay and rained-out rot.

She staggered, understanding that the stains she saw were only oil on burlap; the stuffed clothes only filled with plant matter and not bloated flesh. Half-mangled, its tattered cowl and straw hat remained where its stuffing spilled from opened wounds in the denim trousers.

A crow flew overhead, and she understood what she’d found, but only at a distance from the reality that something had chased her so far into the field that she’d discovered its dwarfed scarecrow. The corn grew so high that it had been hidden from the road, but —

Obi-Wan had put it here.

Shaking, she edged underneath it, peering up under the brim of its hat, suppressing a scream but barely:

Someone had painted a cruel smile in red beneath black, button eyes.

The post on which it had been impaled bore gouges: four stripes clawed into the weathered post, bearing sapling wood beneath the bark.

In the distance, someone shouted her name.

“No,” she whispered. Not again. “No, no, no --“

“Rey?”

She sucked in a breath, her blood pounding in her temples. Shaking it off, she swallowed, willing her ears to pop to get rid of that drowned out, distant familiarity of the sound —

“Rey!”

Ben.

She shouted back — the single syllable garbled with tears, terrified that he wouldn’t hear her.

“Ben!” she tried again as she turned at a stagger, lurching towards the sound.

Please call my name again, she begged. Please —

Distant and tinny, she heard the surprise in his voice as Ben called back, “Rey!”

She ran towards it, hope and terror catalyzing into something that spurred her onward through the rows, stopping her from looking over her shoulder as the gabled peaks of its patchwork roof bled into view above the corn.

Its whispers followed her; the field’s attention settling onto its haunches as if allowing her passage, but unconvinced that it ought to let her leave.

Relief bubbled hot inside her, drawing out her pounding pulse and the stinging pain of cornsilk clinging to her cuts in streaks. It smelled raw and volatile, and as earthy as the grave as Rey stumbled out onto a patch of lawn on the eastern border of the property, gasping and swearing and crying for Ben. Her knees hit the earth first, blood in her mouth from where she’d bit her tongue, lashes on her arms like penitence for crimes she hadn’t known she’d committed.


	18. Blood on the soil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there's your NC-17 rating:
> 
> I always struggle with a few key words, and the debate is usually (if I'm writing porn that's a little more melodic) do I say "pussy", or do I just drop a "cunt" in there because we are totally reclaiming that word, yessir? Or do I just avoid it because it doesn't fit the mood? And then I go down this rabbit hole where I'm like, "How does Rey refer to her own bits?" And then I'm like, no, no, no -- this is smut: not sweet, lovely lovemaking. They're fucking and that takes strong, dirty language to shock and titilate.
> 
> So if you're unaccustomed to the particular flavour of dirty talk used here, apologies in advance.

Folded into Ben’s arms, she struggled only a moment, craning to peek over his shoulder as he carried her back to the house that she’d been trying to dismantle from the inside out. The field sat still and watchful behind them, and Ben didn’t stop for her hissed squeal of pain when she squirmed. He stared straight ahead — his purpose driving him to get her inside as quickly as possible. Ben barely even looked her over, but Rey got a glimpse of herself: bereft one sneaker, scratched, stinging, and bloody — and streaked with sticking corn silk as stubborn as spider web. Dirt caked her knees and left crescents beneath her nails. Smears of mud down her pants.

“I told you,” he said, taking the stairs to the back porch in one stride, her feet knocking into the siding as he nearly hauled the screen off its hinges in the effort to get her inside. “I told you not to go into the field.”

A rustle from behind had her craning to peer over his shoulder, her heart hammering. The corn waved to her with a serene gesture that made her shiver.

A shadow moved amongst the rows.

“Ben,” she hissed. “Ben look!”

He spared only a glance for her, the look he wore silencing her: fear pinched his features, concern for her painting over a thin layer of simmering anger.

“I went to the Hanna City police,” she tried to explain. “They were supposed to send a squad car to check the field where Chewie disappeared.”

He sat her on the kitchen counter, kicking the door shut without a glance outside.

“Ben, I —” For a split second, she considered apologizing, then thought the better of it. It was her property, and she’d had every right to walk onto her land — her _field_ — and search for some sign that her dog had met with foul play. She grit her teeth, the heaviness emerging in her limbs anchoring her where new pains bloomed. “There’s something out there,” she said instead, the shakiness of her voice demonstrating all the crazy lurking behind door number three.

Only after the lock was flipped into place and Ben threw the deadbolt, did he look her over. Something simmered in his gaze, turning her insides into a shrinking knot. The fall of his heavy steps made the linoleum crackle as he loomed over her, pushing the hair from her forehead in a gesture too tender for his simmering rage. His nostrils flared, and Rey marvelled at the twin dots of pink on either cheek.

His throat worked, and struggling, it looked for a moment that he wanted to agree with her.

Instead, he frowned down at her injuries, clasping her wrists — so tiny in his large hands — and opened them so that they sat palm-up on her knees, revealing her error:

Cuts and slashes smeared her skin.

His voice was the low rumble of thunder from far away when he asked, “Are you hurt?”

A threat still simmered in his gaze when he stepped back, his gaze like hot coals that raked her over, leaving her feeling raw and shivering as if with the first touches of fever.

She opened her mouth, but couldn’t respond.

The demand for truth notched his volume up, a fierceness turning his tone hostile. “Did you —” He stopped himself, turning away to collect himself. He exhaled sharply, his fists knots that hung at his side.

A vein in his throat ticked like a hot car engine.

Rey straightened, instinct overriding caution a moment as her heart began to chug.

“Did you put your hands on the earth?”

A ringing filled her ears.

She looked down, seeing flecks of soil still clinging to her skill amidst the slashes.

What did it matter if she had?

Frowning, she realized she wasn’t certain.

Ben’s expression kept her from saying anything. She shrank away an inch, recoiling at the intensity of his scrutiny.

For a moment she wondered and where he’d kept this anger tucked away for so long — how well he’d hidden it from her. Fear thrilled through her; a new sort of understanding blooming when she saw how long the shadow he cast truly was. Hulking, he loomed over her, still taller than she was even though her feet dangled three feet off the ground. Everything hurt, yet the urge to reach for him had her curling her fingers — wanting to cross the widening gulf between them before it became too large to traverse; so that he wouldn’t loom so dark and terrible before her.

She didn’t understand. Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged — her breath clicked in her throat.

More ominous still, he asked: “Did you bleed on the soil, Rey?”

Some old pain had taken up residence next to his rage.

Cold spread through her chest at a painfully glacial pace, siphoning into her shallow wounds, turning her small hurts electric and tingling with sensitivity.

Could it be that she hadn’t imagined it? The sounds, the thrashing corn that seemed to herd her into a part of the field where she’d emerged but hadn’t entered — following the paths left by Obi-Wan and Chewie?

Rey licked her lips, sifting through reason and failing to see how the hell he could agree with her.

She didn’t know what to tell him —

It happened so quickly that Rey jerked: his arm shot left, the wall beside the rotary phone shuddering from the impact as his fist struck through. The impossible sound in tight confines, left her locked in place, curled into herself as if in defence even though he’d come nowhere near her. Still, she could feel the reverberations of the strike in her bones. It rang in her ears. The shock of it setting her blood at a gallop. Breathing hard, Ben stood there staring a moment longer, his shoulders heaving, plaster dust and wallpaper dented by his fist.Already, bruises were forming over his knuckles.

He wouldn’t meet her gaze — dark hair hanging in strands over his forehead, hunched into himself, the sound of his breathing laboured. Sharp.

It was a moment further before she found her voice. She croaked his name.

He’d put a fucking hole in her wall.

She glanced from it, back to his fist, back to his face.

Uncertain what to do, the momentary flicker that he might turn a similar violence to her didn’t lift and take flight. Rather, her shock dissolved into something that felt like incredulity, that was rapidly replaced with anger that she couldn’t find a reaction at all.

A flash of that flinty look again. He glanced away. Pulled his lip into his mouth. Shook his fingers out.

Made a fist.

All before Rey swallowed, the tightness in her chest unwilling to unspool.

Whatever it was out there — Ben wasn’t alleviating any of her fears. Irrationally, that left her more pissed off than the impromptu renovation job.

“It can’t be real,” she managed, but Ben had scooped her up, piling her into his arms like a rag doll before she could protest.

“Let’s take care of your injuries,” was the only acknowledgement he offered. “You must be in pain.”

Flat. Hard. His chest was a wall. His arms steel.

She bristled, her feet dangling. She stiffened.

“I can walk,” she countered hotly.

He raised his eyebrows, already halfway down the hall, fixing her with an incredulity that prickled. “Whatever you say, sweetheart.”

Rey pushed at his shoulder, using her elbows to untangle herself from his grasp, but Ben wouldn’t meet her gaze.

“Put me down, Ben,” she said.

His jaw was clenched so hard she thought she could hear him grinding his teeth.

“Ben, _put me down_,” she repeated, louder.

When he swung that gaze around to her, something near-animalistic glared back: stony and dark, his skin blotchy, the cords on his neck pronounced from the strain, she pushed from him — it took her kicking legs and a well-placed shove, and Rey toppled to the floor.

She scrabbled back, putting distance between them.

Backlit as Ben was, she only caught a fragment of his expression: a look in his eyes that offered neither sympathy or restraint. The rest of him swelled in the hall as a presence might — a long shadow cast up the walls and into the corners where they curled and draped, folding onto themselves as if to descend atop her head.

Rey crab-walked to the wall, her shoulders striking the wallpapered plaster, and she forced herself to her feet, breathing hard.

His voice was the low rumble of a distant storm. It raised the hair on the backs of her arms. “I told you not to go into the field.”

Her fingers found the entryway to the parlour, gripping the wall for additional support. It felt for a moment that Ben had gone — replaced by some other thing that borrowed his face. His darker half, perhaps: a side she had yet to know.

Breathing hard, she straightened to her full height — a full head shorter than him. Not to be intimidated, she pushed off the wall. Held her ground though her pulse thrummed in her throat. Anger beckoned, fuelling stupidity.

“Under what circumstances did you think you were dictating what I should or shouldn’t do?”

A beat stretched, the tension between them coiling and hungry.

He might’ve opened his mouth to say something back, but Rey turned away from him with a glare, and stomped — _stomped_ — the rest of the way down the hall without a backwards glance.

It should have been comical, were it not for the fact that the next moment, he barrelled after her, shouting, “Wait!” too late:

Rey shouldered through the screen door, letting it smack shut behind her. A glance at her palms, and with grit teeth, she wiped the blood on her pants though it stung.

No, she didn’t know if she bled on the bloody field.

What bloody difference did it make if she did?

“_Rey!_” Ben roared.

She took off across the lawn, shouting over her shoulder, “You have _no right_ \--“ She didn’t stop, thrashing towards the barn — skirting the field as long as she could. Her pulse thundered in her ears, turning her vision splotchy and focused on only her destination.

“You do not dictate what _I_ do, Ben Solo. You do not walk into my house and spout your superstitious nonsense. You do _not_ try to scare me off.”

Just like Snoke.

The thought fluttered, settling with the delicacy of a feather. She brushed at it hotly, not wanting to believe what she was seeing — what he was insinuating.

“Rey, I’m not —”

Something faltering in his voice. She heard him stagger.

“You’re just like the rest of them, aren’t you? It’s a clever ruse. Good on you for convincing me —”

Sterner, this time: “Rey.”

Tears burned, and she swiped at them with dirty fingers.

She turned halfway, not willing to stop even as his fingers grazed her sleeve. She wrenched her arm away. Bared her teeth as she rounded on him and put both palms to his chest. Shoved him back.

He fell away at a stagger, surprise registering: it cleared his face, changing his appearance wholly from a brooding young man to something far more innocent; more vulnerable.

“For one moment,” she seethed, “I thought you were different than the rest of them.”

But he wasn’t.

Those things that he’d hidden from her so cleverly painted him all the more the monster of her nightmares. Rey thought of the photos of Han Solo in Detective Dameron’s office: the blood.

She drew herself up to full height and spat at him with a bitterness, “You had me convinced that I wasn’t alone in all this.”

A series of emotions flit across his face, his jaw tightening finally.

He took a step, the grass crackling under his boots.

It seemed the only sound for miles. Heart hammering, tears welled over at last.

Her grandfather. Her parents. Her Chewbacca.

The omissions made by the mayor. The investigation that yielded no answers. Archaic customs that turned its inhabitants suspicious of anyone from the outside.

Ben had his part to play, too, and he was doing an admirable job of it. She almost scoffed, but she couldn’t suck down a breath quickly enough to move the lump in her throat.

Rey thought of Snoke: the possessive curl of his fingers on Ben’s shoulder.

Evidence in photographs. Bodies in pieces, their blood salting the earth.

“Why did you do it?”

The words hung between them: an accusation. The slow prickle of anger smouldered in her chest, the air crackling with everything unsaid that hammered around her head. All those fragments moved too quickly, the removal of Ben Solo’s masks offering only starker truths that suggested any trust placed in those pretty brown eyes was forfeit.

The words caught behind her teeth, but Rey forced them out:

“Why did you kill your father?”

It seemed as if a window shuttered closed in his features. He pulled back, his hand dropping to his side.

She hadn’t even realized he was reaching for her.

Rey folded her arms across her chest, watching the way the lines smoothed over his forehead. Resigned.

“You have that look in your eyes —” he began.

She shook her head.

He was trying to distract her.

“You’re not denying it,” she shot back.

His grim regard should have stopped her cold. Instead, Ben answered in a tone edged with warning.

“I didn’t realize you thought me suspect.”

A chill spread through her at that; chased rapidly by a rising well of guilt that she quickly squashed with the reminder to herself that Ben was a son of Junari Point; for everything she thought she knew about him, she couldn’t truly tell truth from the facade. But it didn't feel right: the diversion. The avoidance. Something he wasn't telling her. She just couldn't pinpoint how she knew.

He’d scared her — as much with his behaviour as the shadow of doubt he wore like a mantle.

“What is it you want?” she demanded, hating how her voice cracked. “The farm? The land?” She shook her head, her voice turning shrill. “The house? All of it?”

Those large hands of his wrapped into fists. A muscle ticked in his jaw.

His silence was so much worse than a confession.

A beat. His voice faltered. “You. Just you.”

Her chin crumpled at that, her vision mottled and blurred through. Rey forced herself to move, shaking her head.

He said after her, raising the hair on the back of her neck, “So that’s it, then?”

Thrashing her way through the high grass to the barn, she didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say. Her chest ached. Absent answers, there were no solutions: only distrust.

“You’re not like them, Ben.”

She wiped her face on her sleeve. Louder, “You don’t need to go this way.”

He roared, “You don’t know anything!”

It should have stopped her. It shouldn’t have cleaved her heart as it did.

Turning, nearly at the shelter of the barn, a low, cool breeze rolled over the fields, lifting her clothes from sweat-damp skin.

He stood there like a smudge of shadow against so much desiccated ruin — the land ravaged, and he, the fallen creature that ruled over it. So much nothing, she thought: such a waste. When Ben moved, he came at her with newfound purpose.

“I am the heir apparent to a legacy that I never wanted; that I could never live up to if I tried -- I am bound to it like I’m bound to this town. These people? Their strange customs that you find so easy to disparage? It keeps them sane. Safe. We don’t leave, Rey — we keep the land we’ve grown from. It keeps us too.”

“You have a choice!” She bit back. “You don’t need to be Snoke’s lacky —”

“I’m his _apprentice_,” he spat back. “I’m the inheritor to a legacy greater than anything you could possibly imagine. It’s an _honour_ to serve —“

“— Letting him feed your fears with these insane stories about —“ She waved. “Demons in the corn.”

“Spirits,” he corrected at a shout. “The spirit of the _land_, Rey. Because every culture believes in something —”

She scoffed. “Campfire tales. _Ghost_ stories —“

He raked his hands through his hair, shaking his head. “There are forces at work here greater than you can imagine —”

“_There are no such thing as ghosts, Ben!_”

“_I never said that there were!_”

“You implied there was _something_ out there. I saw it, too. I felt it — it bloody _chased_ me.”

He looked away, shaking his head roughly. Five feet apart now, and they might’ve been circling each other under different circumstances. As it was, he corralled her against the barn. While it lacked intimidation, the size of the man before her — the reach of his frustration — pushed her back further.

Skirting a stack of pallets and old wooden crates, she put the pile between them as if it might stop him from gaining ground.

“I told you not to go out there.”

_“You won’t tell me why.”_

“I would see you safe,” he snarled. “Safe and untouched by this place —”

“This _is_ my place,” she shot back. “My family’s. ‘Kenobi blood salts the soil of this town’. That’s what your mother told me. I am _not_ leaving —”

“I didn’t ask you to. I only wanted you to exercise a little caution.”

“From what?” she challenged. “Go on. You know just as well as I do that Obi-Wan remained here for a reason. You _know_ what’s out there. You know what he was doing here. You _and_ your so-called friends. Your —” She flapped. Shook her head. “What is Snoke exactly? Your teacher? Your _master_?” She scoffed. She was goading him. “What can he possibly offer you that’s so important.”

Briefly, exasperated, he looked skyward as if he might find answers there. Ben’s adam’s apple bobbed.

“Why are you all so interested in scaring me off?” she pressed.

Quieter: “I’m not.”

Rey raised both eyebrows, her mouth pinched into a sharp pucker. She could feel the heat in her face, anger turning her hostile.

“What happened to Chewbacca.” A command. Not a question.

Dark eyes flicked up to hers. He knew. Ben knew and he wasn’t telling her either.

“Go,” she said, a tremor in her voice turning it into a quake. “You need to leave.”

Louder, he said, “It was only a _question_.”

With a whole pack of crazy behind it.

Snarling, Rey stalked left towards the side of the barn closest the field, intent on leaving him behind if he had no intention of respecting her wishes.

“I can take care of myself. I always have,” she snapped back.

_“Did you bleed on the soil, Rey?”_

She rounded on him, all five and a half feet but she felt twice as tall as she yelled at him, _“I don’t KNOW.”_

Shaking, she glowered up at him.

To say he paled would be an understatement. “Then it’s too late anyway.”

Resigned, he shook his head. Swallowed. Raked his hands through his hair.

It looked like he was considering hitting something again. Standing so close, she could feel the heat radiating off of him: a churning tension that brushed at her, leaving her edgy. Hyper-aware of every taut muscle. The scent of his skin.

Damn him.

“Hey!” She snapped her fingers at him.

Ben recoiled. Swore. _“What?”_ he shouted.

“I don’t need you looking out for me. I didn’t ask —”

“Like I have a choice —”

“It’s always been just me and I’ve done just fine —“

“Not this time, sweetheart —”

“Don’t you call me —”

“You’re not alone!” he bellowed.

“Neither are you!” she roared back.

Breathing hard, they stared at each other a moment further. The air hitched in her lungs, watching the shift in his features as the look on his face sank from anger to something more predatory. His gaze flicked down, the attention lighting a searing path down her front as if tapping a match to kerosene.

A guttural, abbreviated noise escaped him: part frustration, part pent-up hostility, part-desire.

She couldn’t get over the way his lower lip pillowed like that; like she wanted for a moment to sink her teeth into it. To bite down hard enough to make him make that sound again.

Rey flicked her gaze up, and Ben found her. Pinned her with a look that spoke of darker, somnolent things stirring deep in earth; shadows amidst tall trees. He loomed, his shoulders lifting with each breath, and when his shadow crossed hers, she shivered — unable to stop the rush of warmth that followed as everything inside her tightened, winding like a spring. It made her bones hum. It made her head swim.

The crate hitting the wall rocked her forwards as he lunged, as if the sound of wood splintering and detonating against the barn’s siding was the hair trigger necessary for collision.

Lips parting, she stole a breath, and Ben found her mouth.

Her shoulders hit the barn’s siding next, legs finding purchase at his waist as he cupped her ass and tacked her to the old wood. His mouth crashing into hers possessed a violent brevity that made her gasp, and when Rey opened her mouth, Ben’s tongue filled her — seeking some sliver of control over the situation.

She gripped his hair, trying to gain dominance over the kiss, but he’d notched against her softer parts -- and the feeling of his length — hard against her core — made her arch her back into him as he propped her up with his hips.

She must have made a sound, because the broad span of his hands folding around her ribcage tightened, pulling her back only enough to notch two fingers down the front v made by her flannel, and the breath of chilly air that touched her was only as strong as the sensation of tearing fabric he ripped down the button closure, muttering the word, “Fuck,” into her mouth when the tips of his fingers grazed a nipple through the thin cotton of her bra.

He pulled back, and Rey let him. The sheer size of him was enough to pinion her, his other hand trailing her stomach, finding the catch of her jeans and thumbing open the button.

“Not here,” she panted.

He stilled, fingers stalling, his jaw working. She caught the corner of his mouth harshly, the stubble of his beard raking over sensitive skin.

She wanted his mouth on her — anywhere he might be willing to put it.

“Not here,” Ben repeated, lips barely moving.

The heat of his fingers brushing the thatch of her pubic hair was maddening, and she rocked up so he could feel what wanted for him if he obliged.

_Yes, there_, she wanted to say — and maybe she whimpered it, but his answering growl set a tremor in her legs, one she wasn’t wholly able to negotiate as he set her down and repositioned himself, turning his hand, using it to push down the zipper of her pants as he cupped her.

Rey let her eyes flutter shut for just a moment, but he didn’t move. He didn’t press or nudge, he didn’t draw back any further — he only held her heat against the palm of his hand.

It was a moment further, the pair of them pressed together and breathing hard, before Rey realized she’d clawed under his work shirt. She loosened her fingers, smoothing over the marks she’d made, and he groaned into her throat. Tucked his thigh between hers to support her, adding only a little pressure, but not enough. His length fit against her stomach, pressing into her hip with insistence. When she palmed him though his jeans, Ben’s answering groan as he pushed into her hand left her shuddering.

Rey could almost feel the throb of his sex, calling out to hers to join him.

“I’m going to fuck you into the side of this building if you don’t tell me where,” he growled.

She shifted, breathing hard, the feel of his fingers so close to where she needed them to be enough to climb his thigh. Rey squirmed, rocking against his hand with a whimper of defeat.

“Is that what you want?” he asked.

His breath clouded her senses, his mouth so close to hers that it was all she could do to keep herself from rising up to meet him. To taste him again.

“Take me upstairs,” she managed, eyes fluttering shut as his fingers brushed the wet and warmth between her thighs. Digging her nails into his sleeves, she dropped her forehead to his shoulder. He didn’t budge, save to slip one digit where it was needed most.

Her vision spotted over, her mouth dropping open.

“Ben,” she gasped.

“You’re so fucking wet.” His voice was the rumble of thunder, rolling through her. “You’re so fucking wet, Rey,” he repeated, disbelief leaving him stark before her.

She nodded into his bicep, fighting the urge to sink her teeth in. Her body tightened, grasping at him as the pad of his finger slipped past her clit, easing into her folds.

His mouth found her throat and Rey gasped as his tongue laved a shivering line to her ear.

Her head rocked back, allowing him better access as he trailed fire down to her collarbone, licking a path to her breast.

“We won’t make it.”

She squeezed her thighs around him, wanting him deeper.

“There’s no one out here to see,” he said into her chest, taking her nipple into his mouth, the fabric of her bra and all. She arched into his lips, the languid glide of his long fingers against her begging entry becoming a pleasurable torture.

She needed him inside her. Now.

“Please,” she gasped, his fingers spreading her folds apart — she didn’t know what she’d beg him for: to take her away from the corn field, or to fuck her with his fingers, right there on the spot.

Ben lifted his head, pushing her bra out of the way. She whimpered at the snap of fabric against her skin.

“Please what?” He took her nipple into his mouth, the spit on her skin cooling and raising goosebumps.

Gripping his hair, she pulled his head back. A storm simmered in his gaze as he rose above her, descending to claim her mouth.

Her shoulder blades hit the barn again as he angled himself better, curling his fingers into her.

“Say it,” he said into her mouth, and Rey gasped as he filled her.

“Tell me what you want, Rey.” Caught her earlobe with his teeth.

She breathed, “I want you to --“

His cock burned through his jeans, warming her skin. She wanted to climb him. She wanted him to tear off the rest of her clothes and drag herself onto his lap so she could sink onto him with her knees in the dirt.

“I want you to fuck me.”

Into her ear, he smiled.

“Oh,” he murmured, a low rumble against her chest. “I will.”

She shivered against it — the spindling air secreting between them as he withdrew, clapping a hand to her ass to hold her upright as his tongue found her throat — laving a long line from the softest hollow to her ear. He caught it between his teeth, Rey bucking against him in surprise as spots dotted her vision. Nipples raked flannel following the pop of a few buttons, and the sharp, stinging surprise of her bra snapping away from her skin with a tear.

Those large hands raised her an inch higher, Ben throwing fabric off to the side. Rey wasn’t sure what. Her legs wrapped his waist, a game of not allowing her feet to touch the ground the challenge as one large hand supported her from thigh to buttock — fingers grazing the heat of her core from behind.

She keened a noise low in her throat, eyes fluttering shut against the rough wrench of her waistband pulled down.

Cold air on her thighs. The warmth of his fingers gripping her behind the knees.

He found her mouth again as he carried her away from the barn as if she weighed nothing at all.

“Where.” A desperate ask; already she could feel the shudder in his limbs. It wasn’t from exertion, but rather, the struggle to maintain control of himself.

His tongue filled her mouth before she could answer, her fingers wrapping those long, silky locks of black as if she could direct him.

They sank to earth somewhere in tall grass. They hadn’t even made it to the porch.

“Yes,” she breathed, pulling with fevered insistence at stubborn cotton.

Ben ripped his shirt over his head, his weight sinking her deeper into the dusky, dry scent of earth and parched grass. Cold and damp at her back. The warmth of his skin under her hands — all corded muscle and restrained fury. The slick of sweat between his pectorals. The shuddering muscles of his abdominals when she touched him, venturing further to fumble open his belt, blind and needing more.

He drew her chin up, filling her mouth with his tongue as his fingers sank into her hair, the slide of his kiss warm, and wet, and full — like he endeavoured first to fuck her mouth with his own before moving on to the parts of her body that shuddered in echoes of the sensation, imagining what it might feel like if he were to place those kisses between her legs.

His hand stole down her front, finding the barrier of her panties and with a grunt, ripping them away.

Rey gasped, the sound smothered as he spread her thighs with his knee and licked into her mouth.

Without preamble, he grazed her clit. Once. Twice so that she rose to meet him, arching her back and trying to draw him closer. Pushing her hip down to earth, Ben’s fingers found their way to their mark — sliding deep and sure inside her as she shuddered to stillness.

Rey whimpered, clawing at his arm as he pulled back to gaze at her expression. Something dark danced there as she adjusted, unable to stop herself from squirming under him.

Dragging his nose over her cheek, his breath mingling with hers, he waited for her to still.

His voice was the rumble of thunder against her chest. “Good?”

No. “More,” she breathed.

Ben obliged by withdrawing slow, and easing back in. Rey made a choked noise. He did it again, and she whimpered.

“Please.” She scrabbled at his fly. Ben leaned his weight on her leg, increasing the steady, curling drive of his fingers inside her as she bucked against him, angling her hips to grind into the heel of his hand.

Whatever tension remained in her spun insistent through her limbs, gathering at the juncture where Ben touched her, tightening to the point where Rey’s head rocked back, her torso arching off the ground, her legs burning with that impossible, sweet pressure that needed —

“_More_.”

And stars in her eyes. A gasp and the darkness rushed in, blanketing her with its sweet, hazy spread.

Her limbs loosened, falling backward as he cradled her. Ben caught her lip, softer this time, with the sort of demand that suggested while he’d offer a brief reprieve, they were only just beginning.

Her head rolled left, and Rey’s eyes fluttered open in the aftermath of spent pleasure, her body pliant as he drew her on top of him. Put her hands to his chest as he sat up with her in the grass, spread over him so easily.

He kissed her throat. Her collarbone. Took a breast into his mouth, and she arched into his touch, rocking upwards in his lap as she felt the loose cotton of his boxer shorts brushing against her core.

“Oh,” she managed, reaching down to free his cock.

He grunted at the contact, his teeth grazing her flesh as he lifted her by the hips.

Fumbling. She felt the press of steely heat a moment, and then the delicious ache of flesh finding flesh as he eased her back down, sheathing himself deep within her. He hadn’t even bothered to extricate himself from his jeans.

Rey made a small noise of surprise at the sensation. Too much at first, she clawed his shoulders, his fingers sinking into her back as she endeavoured not to squirm.

“Yes,” he breathed.

Her body throbbed, waking her to the feel of him — hard and hot and heaving breaths into her neck. He placed a kiss there. Smoothed his hands down her body in a gesture that was almost worshipful.

The grass around them tickled, waving. Her eyes fluttered shut against it, turning her face into his neck, the feel of his stubble razing her cheek, repaired by his lips a moment later. Soothing.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

Experimentally, Rey shifted, and Ben bit back a moan.

The sensation was almost too much; she felt almost too full, but movement was not impossible:

She exhaled a breath she hadn’t been aware she’d been holding. She found his mouth once more, the slant of his lips against hers coaxing, easing discomforts as much as his caress: warm hands against her cooling skin.

She’d lost her top somewhere along the way, and Ben’s had followed.

“More,” she said.

Dark eyes watched her, embers from some long-smouldering fire lingering there in the depths. He licked his lip, pulling her close to him as she angled off, rising just enough to withdraw.

Ben groaned, and Rey found that she could appreciate the sound.

She pressed a chaste kiss to the corner of his mouth, and slid back down his length, the muscles in her thighs protesting briefly. Angling her hips, the too-full sensation eased, the warmth and wet and pulse of their connection point drawing them together more tightly, she released a shuddering gasp at the sensation, trying to climb farther into his lap; to be closer; to angle her hips just enough to —

Just to —

Just to —

“Fuck, ah —“ Rey gasped into his mouth, her movements abbreviated as he raised his hips to meet her, one hand in the dirt, driving deeper as he brushed against the spot inside her; thumbed her clit while those long fingers wrapped her hip, guiding each thrust. 

She glanced down long enough the see the slick shine of moisture on his shaft, the shock of black hair as his fingers found her throat; turned her head to him so that she had to meet his eyes.

Black with desire — a hunger so profound it made her gasp.

Rey drove her fingers into his hair, his hat long gone, feeling only the desperate coiling desire low in her belly as orgasm threatened.

“Not yet,” he said, but protest was lost to the plaintive noises of being denied.

Folding together, he claimed her mouth anew, wrapping her to him and drawing her back to the ground where the tickle of grass brushed at her skin, fingers laced together as he raised her arms above her head, clasping both her wrists with one hand, the other gathering a leg over his hip as he sank more deeply into her, pressing her back into the ground as he thrust once. Twice. Slowly. Testing.

Rey sucked in a breath. Met his gaze with interested hunger, and lifted herself just enough to lick a line from his adam’s apple to his jaw. He shuddered above her, his grip tightening.

She breathed into his ear, appreciating how he struggled to restrain himself, still — strands of his hair falling to tickle her face. Her teeth caught the lobe, and she nipped him gently in encouragement.

In challenge, she murmured, “_Harder_.”

And then, restraint ripped away with permission, he was _fucking_ her.

Unleashed, Ben made a plaintive, desperate, furious noise — something in between a cry of pain and release so absolute that she might’ve appreciated it if not distracted: she arched off the earth, her eyes fluttering open to that sea of gold beyond them, dotting black as he struck that tightly coiled spring inside her over and over again, plucking it like the string of a violin wound too tightly.

Darkness threatened, breathing seized in an “o” of pleasure that made no sound at all for a beat as their worlds hung suspended for just a moment, and then all feeling crashed down at once as their releases collided.

Hands freed, Rey clawed at his shoulders, heard herself roar after the flood of feeling that sent waves through her limbs — the ebb of it carrying her, laughing sharply in surprise. She jerked, her clit overstimulated, her cunt clenching him as if she wasn’t ready to let go.

So full, she thought.

So good —

So complete.

Breathing hard, he turned his face into her neck — warm, moist air tickling her face. He rolled off her, pulling her with him as if there was any other place to go. They slipped apart, but enfolded in his arms, he pressed a kiss to her forehead as if the effort was the last of him that he could offer.

A grunt. A chuckle.

Ben smelled like sweat and sex, dirt and grain. She didn’t shiver, but he pulled her close and still heaving breaths, brushed another kiss to her temple and smoothed back her hair.

She looked up, the tenderness so strange when cast against the fury of their argument. It had stopped ringing in her ears, but the creeping certainty of dread remained — only having pushed it away for a time.

A small frown tugged at the corners of his mouth.

She meant to pull away, to try and sift through the encroaching confusion of it all, muddled by the warmth of his body and the ease of his touch — but he stopped her with quiet and plaintive insistence.

Something familiar simmered between them: an exchange of impressions that shied away from forming into a vision, but she felt the familiar pull to him like she had that day they’d almost kissed. Why it wouldn’t happen again, she wasn’t certain: perhaps because she’d seen his nature, all that anger rearing up inside him, and she’d accepted that perhaps his shadow was somewhat darker than others.

Rey didn’t stop to ask what he’d been doing at Kenobi House — what might’ve drawn him to her inherited home at the time that she’d needed him to find her, stumbling out of the field, chased by creatures unseen —

She didn’t stop to ask why he’d followed her.

Her heart resumed its steady hammering. Looking at him then, Rey couldn’t be certain, but there seemed a stirring; a disturbance that should have felt otherworldly in contemplation, but strangely seemed to fit.

Not alone, he’d said. Some part of her wanted to believe that he was right.

Sliding into the space beside her, her thigh notched over his hip, the boundaries between them hardly a space worth considering, Rey found only a thought between breaths: a tremulous thing found between their tangling souls as he smiled, hesitant, against her mouth.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I feel it too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another big thank you to MissFLT who generously [made fanart for this story](https://twitter.com/MissFLT/status/1186971175848697856?s=09), interpreting the window scene from a couple of chapters back. 
> 
> You guys have been great. Sorry for the wait on this chapter, we got a puppy. Have I mentioned that before? He wakes us up several times a night and sleep-deprivation makes me hyper-creative but ultra sluggish. Something about knocking down a bunch of perceived walls. Less restraint. Some shit. But then you sit in front of the same paragraph for five hours and don't realize five hours have passed. 
> 
> Much love,
> 
> \- october


	19. Summer King/Winter King

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween!!

Some stories are afforded more weight than bedtime tales: they go on long before and long after they’ve been told, lingering in the hearts and imaginings of those afforded the privilege to hear them told. Strains of some old cautionary tale pulled her from dreams of a red field, the ground sodden and squelching beneath bare toes as she turned mid-escape, struck on all sides by the grain that lashed and beat at her dress — corn silk clinging as if to haul her back to the earth.

When she fell, her knees jarred through to her spine with the force of it, she tumbled back to the ground as if hands reached to stall her plummet — and beyond that, to the places where the roots trailed her limbs with a tender caress as she passed into the dark, the earth closing over her head to devour the sky.

She saw only the shadow as he swam into view overhead, swallowing the sun as if his form could consume the world. Darkness remained; the loamy, rich grit of that fertile soil suffocating as it packed the back of her throat when she took a breath. As if she’d been buried alive.

The scythe glinted once as it swept after her in a swift arc, catching her up cold and cleaving into her side as if to pull the bones away from the skin, like the wheat from the chaff.

Gasping, Rey coughed her way back to consciousness.

Expecting to the crunch and grind of dirt in her mouth, she retched over the side of the bed, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. When the room returned to view, she found a pair of men’s workbooks tossed haphazardly amidst other tossed-off clothing on the floor:

An assortment of denim and plaid and an undershirt, leading to the hall where a partially-opened door revealed muddy footprints and the remains of her panties. Her socks like castoff reminders of what had transpired the evening before. Somehow all these artifacts they’d collected from outside, as if leaving them out there was lure for something else to find them where they’d fallen, spent, in the darkened hours.

The aches of her body served as a reinforcement for the dim impressions that lingered when she closed her eyes:

Ben’s hands. Ben’s mouth.

The man in question lay behind her with the sheets pooled at his midsection, a hand resting on her calf, half-perched on the side of the bed with a rumpled, curious look marking his features like the impressions left by the pillows.

“You were having a bad dream,” he offered.

Her heart hadn’t stopped its gallop.

Unable to move, she regarded him a moment further: allowing the rough cobbled patchwork of her sense memories and her absent good sense catch up to her.

They’d had sex within yards of the place where not one, but two men, had died; where something had chased her down like she was its prey; where she thought she’d heard the ghost of her dog growling at her.

That was just the tip of the iceberg.

Stars, she thought: not _just_ sex.

Not a fuck.

That was something else. That was something otherworldly. Primal. _Raw_ and desperate and driven and —

She could feel the warm wetness of arousal between her thighs.

Good. It had been very good.

Nerves twisted her stomach, guilt and uncertainty chasing it all down.

Something passed over his features; concern first, and then some distracted pull drew his gaze back to the window. He’d been watching the field while she slept, Rey realized. Sitting up and taking note of her own nakedness as if the discarded blankets and the wide swath of her sweat marking the sheets wasn’t indicator enough that she’d suffered another nightmare of that man with the scythe — a man who bore such a striking sense impression as the one who now shared her bed — Rey tried to piece through the bits of it that she could grasp without appearing totally insane.

Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she accepted the glass of water he offered though its sides wore the bubbles of a glass that had been sitting on the nightstand for some time.

He’d buried her, she realized.

The man she’d seen in her dreams; her nightmares —

She looked up to find Ben staring at her, waiting as if she’d confess to the secrets she kept from him; that her subconscious saw fit to plague her with when she fell asleep.

“You called my name while you slept,” he said, turning away as if the thought marked him as guilty. “Whatever I was doing to you, it didn’t sound particularly pleasant. I’m sorry for that.”

She couldn’t tell him what she’d seen — that he was the one chasing her down with a weapon meant for the crop, nor that there had been others on the field. Other bodies.

“It was just a dream,” she said, though she didn’t quite believe it herself.

She followed his gaze to the window, seeing their reflection bisected in the panes. “It’s dark out.”

“Well passed dinner,” he agreed. “I’m not wearing a watch, but I’d say we’re approaching ten. Judging by the stars.”

She sat up further, unconvinced that the pinch between his brows wasn’t because of her. What had she said? Had she cried out?

Some part of her didn’t want him to know the details — she didn’t want to accuse him of something that he had no part in when it came to coincidence. He occupied her thoughts, and had since she’d arrived in Junari Point: he was as close to her as her own shadow, though it had taken a few days to truly understand why:

Some feelings, like stories, determined to stray from sentiment, and could be spoken into truth with a few words:

“You stayed.”

He gave her a soft, small smile, touching the back of her hand with warm fingers. “There’s no place I’d rather be.”

She found herself giving him a small smile.

“I thought I’d linger a while,” he explained. “We didn’t finish our conversation.”

“You mean you didn’t finish the interrogation.” The corner of his mouth lifted in a way she thought might infuriate her, were he anyone else.

Rey scooted closer, bunching the blankets up to her chest as he wrapped her against his side. His skin was cool to the touch, his ribs hard, the muscles of his shoulder unyielding.

He smelled of sweat and musk. The lingering perfume of sex lingered in his beard. It wasn’t unpleasant.

“I was listening for the voices you said you heard,” he said, his expression carefully neutral. “I wanted to see if they might call to me too.”

“Have they?” Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat.

He shook his head, placing an absent kiss to her temple. “No.”

He searched her features.

“I wasn’t lying,” she countered. “I have literally no reason to hallucinate any of it.”

He exhaled, pushing the hair back from her face, peering at her down his long nose. “I know. I was hoping perhaps it might be as simple as that.” He pressed another kiss to her shoulder. Another to her neck. They lacked the heat of their first embraces, but preserved some of the tenderness of his touch. Beyond the frantic desperation of their coupling, there was an ease to their gestures — a familiarity that might’ve been eerie had they been anyplace else.

“Stress. Anguish. Strain,” he explained. “All viable explanations in the place of the impossible.”

“You believe me, though,” she said, pushing herself upright to search his features for some lingering bit of candid truth there. “You know something is going on here, but you’re holding back.”

He stared, a muscle twitching slightly beneath his left eye.

“If I thought I could tell you —“ he said in a low murmur.

“I can handle it,” she interrupted. “Whatever it is that’s going on here — whatever happened to Obi-Wan and to Chewie, and to your father —“

“Sweetheart,” he said, clasping her hands to his chest. “I know you’re strong enough to handle most anything. But —” He chose his words carefully, “this is not for you.”

Shadows lingered like secrets in his gaze; an impenetrable darkness that resisted her efforts to reveal what hid there. He pulled her to him, pressing a lingering kiss to her temple, and frustrated, Rey stiffened.

“You should rest,” he said. “Lie down and I’ll tell you a story to lull you to sleep.”

She didn’t think it were possible: sleep was an elusive bedfellow that left the sheets damp and twisted when it escaped her.

“No more nightmares,” he promised, pulling her with him in the circle of his arms, the warmth of his body and rhythm of his breathing soothing — sweeping her with the caress of his fingers, and, finding the beat of his heart, lulling her into shutting her eyes.

She _was_ tired. Haggard, warm with sleep, grit in the corners of tired eyes, and Ben’s touch covered her, prompting her to curl into him — her thigh sliding between his. He smiled into her hair, drawing the blankets up to cover her shoulders.

A small smile, and then, he began:

“Nothing ever happens in small towns, right?”

His breath rustled strands of her hairs, drawing a shiver that became goosebumps over exposed flesh. “This is a promise uttered across generations: that the country is a quiet place, where the people who live on the land learn of its nuances with the slow-moving seasons; winter to spring, and summer to fall. Our blood and sweat becomes the soil; the hard crops that thrive or die alongside the people who work to grow it. It was always this way,” he said. “Though the machines we use to tame the land has changed, the effort remains — lest we forget that without the soil, without the land, we are nothing better than dust. Food for worms.”

He swallowed, and Rey, closing her eyes, felt his head turn back to the window.

“This was the story my mother told me as a boy, when I asked her how so many people could fear the turning of the wheel — how I knew that, when August came, everyone would stay until the first snow: this was how it was told to her, and her mother before her. She told me that when the sun arrived at the zenith on the first day of true autumn, we would know how to expect a hard winter.

“‘Across the fields, I remember hearing them as a child,’ she would tell me — a woman who had as much Junari soil in her blood as her blood was the soil. ‘They met at midday to determine the victor — a battle between light and darkness, struggling to see who might win to rule another six months of the year. If darkness should prevail, then we would see through the winter. If the light, then summer would delay, and the harvest would continue well into December. One would fall, because even if the winter was brief, we would starve in the following year because the soil wouldn’t have slept and rested as it should have.”

“Who?” she mumbled into his chest.

“Shh. This is the good part.” He smiled into her hair. “No matter the violence of the battle, no matter how hard they fought, there could never be a draw. One ruler should pass the torch — handing over his crown and his rule for half the year, leaving the soil to slumber so that in the next season, the grain would grow once more.”

She saw it then: the two kings approaching at a distance, across a rolling field of golden corn: one shone with dawn’s light, the other, a roiling tower of shadow. The clash of their blades was thunder under a sky turned orange with the promise of a summer storm.

“Always at the midpoint of the year,” she mumbled, her brow furrowing.

“Yes,” he said into her hair. “Because that’s the only time that they stand as equals.”

She squeezed her eyes shut against the sounds of battle — weapons so old that they resembled a rake and scythe.

“So how was the victor determined? How can this be fair?”

He brushed the hair from her forehead, his attention far away from her — on some distant plane where light and dark met to determine the cost of their victims’ lives.

“It is an honour to fall,” Ben said, his voice coming to her from far away; the sound hardly more than a rustle of grain, whispering promises to rise again if it were cut down. She didn’t understand.

The soil was red.

“In the end, the Summer King always kneels.”

Bare his throat.

She heard the cries, _“The neck! The neck!”_ as townsfolk threshed the fields.

Drifting to dreams, she saw only the brush of the grain beneath her hands: waist-high by the fourth of July, and still growing beneath her soft touch as she walked into those furrows.

Sunlight played in dappled patterns beneath low-slung clouds overhead.

It was a story she felt she knew; the sureness of its familiarity as known to her as the bones under her skin when fingertips traced her face. A gentle touch, and she rolled into the palm that smelled of loam and darkness, the warmth of her skin wanting to heat the coolness of someone else’s caress — wanting to warm _him _so that he might seem less like the grave to which he was promised.

A missing piece of the puzzle strayed just out of reach, and somewhere between sleep and waking, Rey understood that nestled into the desire to be close to him, a seed had rooted and grown into something that could not be so easily undone.

She might not tear him from this soil.

Hinted at only by Snoke, Leia, and Ben himself: she knew where he fit, the tightness in her chest bore the markings of a despair that she would lose him, because he willed it to be so.

“There is honour in it.” His voice came from far away.

They were all part of this mythology, she realized as if she could see their faces in the field, between the rows: the blood that had watered the crop. Han and Obiwan, and others before them.

She had the distinct impression that the story was more than just a bedtime tale, even as her grip on the waking world slipped and fell by the wayside. Rey descended because there was nowhere but that staunch oblivion when she yielded to it, knowing that it was more than just a legend as she saw the Summer King sink to his knees in her dream.

The shadow turned its face towards her, but it was not Ben as her dream spun into something else:

Horns spilled from that ethereal darkness, shadow siphoning from the Winter King as its white face lifted heavenward, and the sky seemed to darken with its attention.

Rey saw only the staring eyes of a corpse, the skin sloughed back from bone as the shadows that pulled her towards it across that field seemed to swell, dragging her to the knee, and then the waist as the earth swallowed her whole.

She knew this phantasm: she knew its offerings as evidenced around the small town — in the marks over doorways, on the bodies of the dead, and in the preparations for the harvest as the townsfolk readied to sacrifice one king for another.

She though she whispered into Ben’s chest as she drifted away:

“But what if it was a Queen?”

\--

Dawn slanted its way across her bed like a knife, slicing over her closed eyelids, leaving her wincing, turning away into the warm swath of flesh at her side.

She groaned into Ben’s ribs, the lazy trail of his fingers finding her side, wending with curiosity beneath the sheets.

“Good morning,” he rumbled into her neck, and she smiled, her eyes shut firmly.

“You stayed.”

“I did,” he said. “Just making sure you slept through the night. I thought you could use it.”

She made a noise of agreement. “Time is it?”

“Quarter to seven. We slept in.”

Farm boys. It figured he was an early riser.

She squinted an eye open at him, finding the pale skin of his chest aglow in buttery morning light — like he was hewn from marble. Like he wasn’t born to this life or this land, and his body revolted against the idea.

“You’re so pale,” she whispered, marvelling at it. “How is it that you never take any sun?”

He smirked, pulling his flannel towards him. It dragged over her hip, and with it, he passed fingers over her curves — inviting. Possessive in a way that reminded her of the way he kissed; the way he fucked — like he was claiming her, and his touch was a reminder of the fact.

“Hungry?”

“Starved.”

“I was thinking of fixing something.”

“Eggs and bacon in the fridge. Toast too, on the kitchen table.”

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

He smiled, lingering a little longer.

“What?” she asked, falling open to him as he leaned down to press an altogether too-chaste kiss to her lips.

Something skittered in the periphery of her understanding. Like a glimmer of something over the shoulder, just out of her line of sight: something she felt she ought to know but couldn’t immediately recognize because when she turned to look for it, there was never anything there.

It itched — that knowledge: a word on the tip of the tongue that she couldn’t recall.

A memory she should have known.

Ben drew his thumb across her forehead, trailing down her cheek.

“You’re beautiful like this,” he murmured. “I want to remember it.”

He pulled away, turning from her. Backlit by the window, Rey squinted through the glare, hiding her face but not quickly enough to miss the mark on his back when he moved to collect his pants from the floor.

She turned back, uncertain of what she’d seen. Leaning a little to the left, she blinked the sleep from her eyes, trying to make sense of it:

It looked, at first, like he’d been branded: an old scar puffing the flesh, leaving it whiter and more brilliant than the rest of him. It appeared so quickly that she sat up, the sheets falling to her waist as she called after him as he stood.

Ben turned, his arm already in the first sleeve, his back to the window.

A look of concern marked his face. Surprise and worry must have worked into her tone. She heard echoes of herself; a little too breathy to be normal. A little too shrill.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said, swallowing. Forcing a smile, she tried to recall the lines of it — trying to place how the mark on Ben’s flesh was familiar to her, but knowing that as her heart began to hammer, she couldn’t outright say it, though she wanted to ask him:

_Are you a part of it?_

Marks on his skin. Marks like those cut into Obi-Wan and his father, Han. Marks meant to convey meaning in a language that was either too old or too obscure to fit into the common vernacular.

She forced a smile though it felt brittle on her face. Her heart slammed against her ribs.

He’d spent the night beside her, their intimacy lingering like a pall over the bed.

“Not entirely awake is all.”

Some new awareness shifted, sloughing off him as the tension seemed to uncoil from his shoulders. Raw strength slipped between the lines of his muscles, pooling into desire that dribbled over her when he leaned down once more to sweep his tongue into her mouth. He even kissed her on the nose.

She reciprocated, trying to smother her jackhammering heart; trying to hide the fact that fear snuck into their bed, curled like a weight on her legs that didn’t want to shift as he drew away, giving her a last, lingering look that she thought might’ve been tinged with something darker, now.

Marks in the soil. Marks carved into old wood. Marks written into flesh.

Listening for Ben’s receding footsteps down the hall, she flung herself from the bed, the sheets a bygone consideration as she slapped the bedside table. Nearly upending the glass of water in the process, she discovered the item in question was misplaced:

The ledger was gone, the marks made in its cover with abrupt, harsh strokes a distant memory.

“Three lines,” she whispered to herself, as if convincing herself that what she’d seen was true. She flung herself from the mattress, taking the bedsheet with her but letting it sag as she searched for something to write with. “Three lines and the bowl of an arc, like —”

_Horns_.

Not a crown, but horns. Like an animal.

Rey raked her fingers into her hair, throwing barely a glance at the field as if the corn had changed overnight. She snatched up a shirt, ripping it over her head, and finding a clean pair of jeans in her bag. She threw on panties, forgoing a bra or socks or anything else. Her clothes felt foreign on her; her skin crawling and not her own.

A cold sweat prickled along her spine as she dropped to her knees, shuffling clothes to peer under the bed — needing to be certain that the ledger hadn’t fallen too the floor only to be kicked away.

Straining, she tried to hear Ben’s movements in the house — certain that if she didn’t follow him, she’d hear the sound of a car turning over in the drive; his escape imminent.

The sharp sting of a paper cut made her hiss. Drawing back her hand from beneath the bed, Rey sat back on her heels, pressing the cut before blood could well over. Below the dust ruffle, she found the corner of the old photograph:

Han, Leia, and Luke smiled up at her.

Lifting the ruffle, she swallowed her panic, finding the ledger tossed in a careless heap, but still there. It must have fallen from the bedstead. She shoved the picture into her back pocket at the sound of a shuffle from downstairs.

Rey sucked the cut, grazing her teeth over her flesh to distract herself from the mingled confusion and ebbing sense of betrayal. He hadn’t taken it. Flipping open the cover of the ledger, she passed a thumb over the mark on the cover, finding its pattern familiar and distressing.

Someone had burned it’s likeness into Ben’s skin. She looked up to the door, hearing the shrill whine of the kettle from the first floor as Ben made them coffee.

He meant well, hadn’t he?

It hadn’t been some sort of sordid seduction.

She wiped her mouth and found her fingers were trembling, panic leaving her shaky. She closed the ledger, slipping it beneath her pillow for safe keeping, and then, thinking better of it, drew it back out, searching for another place to tuck it away where it wouldn’t be obvious.

Unable to explain why it was important that she kept the ledger safe from him, she had to rely on instinct alone to guide her.

Downstairs, the clatter of plates and cutlery in the cupboards meant that Ben was midway through breakfast preparations, and, heart pounding, she was about to stand when a movement across the hall drew her attention left to the sealed door revealed by the false wall. From where she knelt, the inch and a half gap revealed the murky daylight trapped in the room beyond.

Knuckles whitening, Rey stilled, catching her breath so that the silence of the upper level rang around her.

She waited, expecting some further movement — some other indicator that she wasn’t alone.

While she couldn’t be certain, she thought she’d heard the hesitant creak of a floorboard.

“Hello?” she breathed, her voice cracking despite the whisper.

The silence became oppressive, the air seeming to thicken.

She shivered involuntarily, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling attention the longer she stared, the hardwood hurting her knees a distant preoccupation. Her heart hammered to a thrum in her temples, pulsing black as spots dotted her vision. She remembered to draw a breath.

The light beneath the doorway obscured once more — a shadow of someone passing behind the door, there and gone in a blink. Rey lurched backwards, her shoulder striking the mattress, shoving the bed backwards with a scree of metal against old wood. She bucked, hands slapping backwards to brace herself, her heart stalling and restarting. The ledger hit the floor, her fingers crushing it.

The light beneath the door did not change again.

A featherlight sensation drew her gaze back to the book in her hand, and she jerked reflexively, not understanding what she found reaching for her beneath the bed at first — and then, with her shoulders slamming into the dresser drawers, she did:

A limp, white hand reached for her from beneath the bed. Fingers flaccid. Dead.

The cry caught in her throat, her pulse slamming behind her eyes, tightening her vision down into a narrow tunnel.

She kicked at it, and it flopped listless to the side, folding onto itself.

A glove.

A woman’s glove, it appeared.

The contents on the side table stopped rocking, and nothing fell on her head, but Rey wrestled with the unbearable image that it appeared for a moment as if the hand — the glove, she corrected herself though her hammering heart screamed that she’d seen otherwise — was reaching for her.

When she turned back to the door, the shadow was gone.

The yellow glow of morning dimmed as the clouds returned, obscuring the brief glint of sun and smothering her wild imaginings. Half-asleep and dimmed with dreams still clinging to her, Rey wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. It came away damp with perspiration. Cold.

Tossing herself forward, she ripped the dust ruffle away from the bed, but found nothing save one half the pair. She pushed it back where it came from, throwing a final, cautious glance around her when the feeling that something regarded her silently and with the patient contemplation of the unchanging dead. She shoved the book after it, tucking it away in haste, her eyes on the door across the hall.

Jerkily, she hefted herself to kneeling, smoothing away her nerves against her legs.

With a rattling breath she crawled, edging her way to the hall and stopping at the threshold, stared at the space between the door and the floor, the ruins of their efforts dusting the floor with debris. Her ribs lurched with the pounding of her heart, and, not wanting to dredge through the bits of wood and plaster, swallowed thickly at the prospect of seeing too much — worse, perhaps, was the possibility of seeing nothing at all; of knowing nothing more of the house nor the man who kept it.

The clatter of a pan in the kitchen sink caused her to jerk, knocking into the jamb and gripping it for support; she clung to it a moment as if it might spare her the dip out of reality into whatever impossibility awaited her.

She eased to her belly, breaths coming in sharp little bursts, and lay her cheek to the floor to peer beneath the door.

It was a moment further before she opened her eyes, terror spotting her vision.

Nothing moved. Nothing there.

“Rey?” Ben called from below.

No shadows. No ghosts.

She eased a shuddering breath, her limbs trembling from the effort. She shut her eyes briefly, and opened them again. Nothing still.

Seeing things.

Only the stiff legs of furniture were apparent. A bed. A dresser, perhaps. Hard to discern shapes.

She sagged against the floor. Licked her lips. Pressed her forehead to solid hardwood and brushed bits of dirt off her skin as she raised herself to her elbows to peer down the stairs.

Seeing things. Hearing things.

Her breathing hitched, and too high, she called back, “Coming!”

She thought of the marks on Ben’s back, her reserves depleted and finding herself struggling to wrestle the pieces into a logical whole that made sense.

Something else crept into her consideration then: a stark thought that she couldn’t look at head-on. It seemed to gristly, at first:

What if the markings were sacrificial, she wondered.

What if they were meant to convey some sort of meaning — like a tree that was meant to be cut down, and slashed across with orange spray paint?

Ben shouted her from downstairs: claiming breakfast was ready.

Rey set her feet beneath her, rising to her knees at a shaky lurch, and finding some momentum to propel her forward though her steps were shuddering and uncertain of holding her weight at first, but grew surer as she passed Obi-Wan’s room, and resolved into at least a semblance of her normal, sure gait as she took the stairs.

What if Ben was marked as an offering for these insane harvest rituals the town participated in?

She forced a smile on her face, some grim resolve working into a rictus.

There could only be one way to be certain.

Rey glanced back at the door, though no sound emerged. No creak of floorboards or the scrape of a drapery across a rod. No ease of bedsprings or sigh of life from within.

She frowned to herself, unease leaving her hesitating.

There wasn’t anything there, she reminded herself. Just like there hadn’t been anything under the bed but an old, lost glove, disturbed by moving the bed. Rey wiped her face, her fingers unsteady.

Some things could be written off as the product of an overactive imagination — others required evidence to stave off any lingering doubts.

She’d need to follow Ben Solo to the festival when he returned that night.

Rey bowed her head to that resolve as she descended to the foyer, the sound of her steps on the stairs like shotgun blasts in the old house.

She didn’t hear the skittering scraps of metal on wood, grating with the slightest rattle, and something unseen pushed Chewie’s dog tag into the hall from beneath the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so -- NaNoWiMo begins tomorrow and I'm committed to finishing some original work for the month. That means a slight shift in priorities and how frequently I'm updating this, but I'll be around. The last handful of chapters in this story were pretty rough the last time I looked at the draft, and that means rewrites, which means slower updates -- especially with work on this YA horror thing that I've got on my plate. 
> 
> See you in a bit.


	20. Je'daii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the wait. I had some NaNoWriMo dreck to wade through.

Later, when they’d eaten and she’d dressed and Ben needed to leave for whatever he did during the day — she assumed he had a job, but it occurred to her she’d never asked him how he occupied himself apart from the festival activities, or nurturing another conviction for murder, it seemed — she found herself silent at his side in the Falcon, driving past miles of fields that circled the town.

He offered only the occasional direction to turn, or a glance that lingered heavily against her skin; the impression of a caress with his gaze alone. Some burning contemplation that left her skin prickling: a mingled confusion of goosebumps and nerves that knotted her stomach and left her squeezing her knees together.

Rey wanted to believe that there was something more to him than the marks on his skin — some misdirection that allowed her to nurture the kernel of hope that whoever Ben Solo truly was, he wasn’t yet lost to Snoke’s machinations.

Rolling grain of varying heights peeled back in strips to reveal the soil beneath. The harvest continued in earnest, it seemed, though it wasn’t apparent who worked the fields. She saw only one combine abandoned out on a property near Sarini Hollow, but couldn’t find a way close enough without trudging over the hewn wheat.

She wondered idly what happened to the spirits that walked the furrows when their cover was culled back like this: did they hide? Go underground?

“You’re pale,” he remarked.

His voice shocked her enough that the wheel jerked in her hands.

She stared straight ahead, doing her best not to look at him as if her expression might give away the struggle of wrestling her rationality.

There were no such thing as ghosts, she reminded herself.

“You make a strong cup of coffee,” she said, forcing a smile. “Left me a little jittery.”

Knuckles white on the steering wheel, she jerked onto a dirt side road, finding even the smaller farms had shorn their crops to the earth. Bales of hay sat like fat, white marshmallows in their plastic wrapping at regular intervals.

It occurred to her that there might be place enough to hide behind one of them, but eventually, you’d be exposed from another side.

He considered her a while longer, thinking.

“You okay?” he asked, but Rey only cut a smile in his direction.

His attention sat heavy in her stomach, twisting her breakfast around as if it were meant to be kneaded into an acidic knot.

“What?”

He wet his lip, scrubbing idly at the pinch of beard beneath his lower lip. It snagged her attention. His eyes darkened; assessing in the way that some otherworldly knowledge left a predatory look on his face.

“You’re nervous,” he said. “Is it because of me? Because of what we did last night?”

Her swallowing was audible, and flushing, she offered a single, airy laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

He waited a beat. “But you’re thinking about it.”

Goosebumps threatened though her skin was hot to the touch, her teeshirt clinging to her lower back with a fine sheen of sweat.

“How do you know what I’m thinking about?”

“Your nipples are pebbled beneath that teeshirt.”

Her exhalation was sharp. Swift with surprise, like a sock to the gut.

Warmth pooled low in her belly.

She glanced at him again, finding his smile as sharp as a knife as he looked her over. Leaning against the car door as he was, elbow on the window, he looked as if he belonged there. Ben looked as if he’d always —

Rey stopped, straightening.

It occurred to her then that as a boy, Ben might’ve sat in that very seat beside his father.

The thought left her cold.

She saw nothing untoward over vast stretches as barbed wire fence and posts sprang up like fingers from the ground; a cat’s cradle of rusted wire between them. She slowed, something catching her attention as the trees demarcating the hollow loomed ahead of her, and squinted at the tattered bit of cloth tied to one of the rusted wires.

Someone had left a faded, paisley strip to dangle: knotted around the fence.

It wouldn’t have seemed strange, but the knot had been deliberately made — and there were others, she found, as she crawled the car forward before making the turn.

Small muddy splashes of color carried on for a mile or more along the fence.

“They’re wishes,” Ben said from her left.

Between them, Rey found a number of corn dollies, dangling by their necks. Smeared, sooty eyes stared vacantly ahead. They had similar gashes for mouths.

She tore her gaze away, finding Ben’s mouth pinched into a flat line. He shook his head once as if begging her not to ask why. Her breathing thinned, spots crowding her vision when she looked back to the doll.

“And those?” she asked, her voice cracking on a higher octave.

“Old harvest custom,” he said, but it sounded strange. Strangled, almost. “An offering for the field.”

An old harvest custom of making poppets and strapping them, laughing, to the fences. She thought of the little girls in town, and the strange, disembodied cries from her dreams that demanded, _“The neck! The neck!”_

She jerked the car left, stones and dirt spitting behind the car.

Five minutes later, they’d reached the Hollow, and Ben gave her a strange, lingering look before pulling his cap low over his eyes. They nodded at each other, some unspoken understanding between them that he wouldn’t scoot down the Flacon’s bench to kiss her goodbye. Not here — not where other eyes were watching.

He came around to her side of the car, staring at the toes of his boots the whole time before ducking down to lean into the window. Glancing right over his shoulder, he tipped his cap at someone she couldn’t see before turning back to her, a new tension bunching his brows together.

She softened, wringing her hands in her lap and unsure why she was holding her breath all of a sudden.

The world grew quiet. Expectant almost.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice little more than a rumble. “For the night. For letting me in at all.”

The urge to touch his skin became a maddening pulse that twitched her fingers. He reached down, fingers dragging over her thigh, and covertly clasping both of her hands into his palm.

He waited, and Rey, bunched and shifting — aroused and terrified — swallowed hard. Searching his expression, she found only concern resting there. A kindred intuition that warred with her good sense: Ben Solo was hiding something from her, and that didn’t stop her from wanting him to move his thumb two inches down her thighs and press those long fingers into the juncture where she might find another sort of relief in oblivion.

Stars, there was everything wrong about this.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” he asked.

She warred with it a moment — her desire to stay near him at war with her baser impulses. To fuck the whole damned thing, drag him back into the car, and hit the gas. Drive until Junari Point was only a dim idea in the rearview mirror, buried in the dust.

Rey shook her head, just once, giving him a small, forced smile.

Oh, right — there was also the little matter of seeing the grandfather she didn’t know buried.

“I appreciate it, but I should do this alone.”

He nodded, searching her features and finding something that earned another ounce of his respect there. Touching his fingers to his lips, he pressed them to her mouth in a furtive, gentle gesture.

She tasted the conflict in him in that one, simple show of affection.

A damning glance left was all she needed. “Snoke is watching,” he explained.

Her heart slammed her ribs. She didn’t look to see for herself.

“I don’t want him to see how much it burns me to let you go like this.”

Her upturned palms caught his hands. She squeezed in reassurance. “Mayor Organa told me where to go.”

_It’s my only chance to say goodbye,_ she wanted to tell him. And to say hello. Truth was: she’d be doing both things at once. Her heart gave a little, pained squeeze as he drew away.

There were other things too, she reasoned — but those weren’t things she wanted to share with him. Like how she thought she knew something wanted her to see what was beyond the locked door of Obi-Wan’s bedroom; how Kenobi House made it seem that it was imperative that she find out — like Obi-Wan’s ghost itself was willing to guide her, though it couldn’t be seen.

He squeezed her fingers before her left her, leaving behind the ghost of an impression that she was meant to be a reassured.

Her smiled faded as his back turned, the moths in her stomach fluttering in disquiet as she backed up, and pointed the headlights towards Ault Sawmill Road. She didn’t look behind her to see if he watched her leave, and she didn’t check to see how Snoke’s attention left a lingering, greasy interest on her taillights — her attention on a fixed point in the distance where the trees loomed harsh and dark against a sky pinked like a drop of blood in a puddle of water.

Turning past the grain silos, she found the mill and its outdoor conveyor belt sagging off the west side of the building. Dark holes remained where windows might’ve stood, once — giving the water-swollen structure an air of decay that made it seem that something stared back at her without really seeing as she drove passed. The conveyor lolled like a tongue out of an open mouth where some persons had long torn off the doors to the mill.

Gravel became dirt, and she slowed though the one thing she wanted most was the put the building behind her. Even the shadows cast by the trees crowded the sky, blotting out the meager light.

Silence fell, and Rey opened the windows to be certain of the eeriness of it beneath the dappled shade:

No birds. Not even the rustle of leaves. Nothing called in the wood at all.

She shivered, recalling parts of her dream that stalled instead of drifting. The words rose to the surface of her consciousness, though it took a moment to place where they’d come from:

_The wind was dead. The ground was thirsty._

When the road ended, it did so with an abruptness that had her bouncing in her seat so hard she nearly struck the ceiling. Killing the engine, she found a narrow path leading into a copse of trees. The only marker that she wasn’t alone was the beat-up Westfalia with a sticker on the bumper. It read like a tell in a game of poker:

A star bird, tie-died as if it owed interest to the Grateful Dead.

The priest, no doubt, could remember easier days.

She wiped her palm sweat down her pants, and, shoving her hands into her pockets, followed the painted sign hidden in the underbrush that pointed to the cemetery.

She wondered how they’d carried the coffin, if they’d come this way with Obi-Wan’s body.

She wondered who’d carried him — if the coroner from Hanna City had come this far out with men sturdy enough to bear him.

The silence rang heavily, even amongst the trees, and Rey quickened her pace for reasons that had nothing to do with the time or whether she was running late. The sensation that clung to her as she emerged onto the potter’s field wasn’t dissimilar from the fields bordering Kenobi House when she’d walked there from the Hollow: it was the simple awareness though nothing rustled the leaves or crunched after her, she wasn’t alone; her presence did not go unnoticed.

When she emerged into the clearing, she found a small cemetery bordering the woods. Its headstones were a combination of stone and marble and homemade wood crosses, some pitted, and others tipping backward with age and an unstable foundation. Tall grasses walled in the small, overgrown cemetery. She found her grandfather easily enough, as someone had taken care to leave him positioned over his final resting place unattended.

There was no priest in sight, and no one except her to lower him into the earth.

She sucked in a breath, tromping through the grass at a slow plod. The earth beneath her feet had an unusual softness to it, and twice, she caught a toe on a fallen slab that had been concealed by the verdure.

Approaching the coffin, she saw that his casket was nothing more than a simple pine box. It was smaller than she’d expected. Nailed shut.

They’d prepared to place him into a grave closest to the field at the back of the cemetery, where only two other stones resided in the row behind him. Those graves were newer, their carvings clean and easily read.

It was a moment before her eyes could focus, her surprise forcing her heart to slow and then double-pound trying to catch up. She caught her breath, her fingers flying to her throat as her knees threatened to give out beneath her.

Rey made a low noise of pain, bereft of words as she read the names on the graves again, and she knew without any uncertainty that she’d found them at last, buried beneath names she didn’t know, but with dates that made them twenty five and twenty seven years her senior.

“My parents.”

She didn’t know she’d spoken until someone cleared their throat behind her, and she whirled, the cemetery blurring as her eyes welled with tears.

“Who are you?”

She didn’t have an answer to that. It appeared that she might never.

Rey made a small, helpless sound.

She gasp-laughed, “I’m not entirely sure.”

She thought she saw the man nod, the grizzled mane of grey haloing weathered features, but something made her hesitate. He wore grey robes, not that she’d expected more formality, but it was a further astonished moment before her brain computed bath robe, and not a priest’s garb. Birkenstocks and socks.

A hysterical titter threatened. At least they weren’t Crocs?

“Are you the priest?” she asked him.

He stared, and wiping her face, she noted clear blue eyes in a weathered face. His lips disappeared beneath his moustache.

“I’m Obi-Wan’s —“ She struggled with it, the sound choking off. Rey laughed again, exasperated this time. She looked back at the two headstones belonging to her parents.

“You’re the granddaughter,” he said. “You’re Rey Kenobi.”

The world seemed to stall, tilting in pain and the surreal knowledge that this person was the first to ever say her name — the whole of it — out loud. It sank heavily, not quite wanting to catch. Not quite wanting to stick in that she couldn’t recognize herself in it.

Rey Kenobi?

She found herself nodding.

“My condolences.” He didn’t offer a hand to shake. He’d tucked them into his sleeves around either elbow, like a monk, or a kung-fu master, she thought.

“Did you know my grandfather well, Father?”

He raised his eyebrows at that. “Luke,” he corrected. “No ‘Father’ — not when your faith is as long lapsed as mine.” He glanced at her, and certain that her puzzlement was creeping towards hysteria the longer she stood between the body of the grandfather she didn’t know, and the parents she’s searched for for as long as she could remember, Rey couldn’t stop the quiver in her lip. Too much, she realized — too much in the glass and it eventually spilled over.

“Hey, kid --“ he started. “Hey —”

“Sorry,” she managed. “Who, then —”

Luke sighed, seeming to deflate a little. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

Rey frowned, her eyes burning. She offered only a small, sharp shake of her head.

“No, no you’re not. I should have guessed you’re not Junari-born.” He exhaled. “You never know, really — who’s on what side. Sorry, I — let’s start again. I’m an old friend of your grandfather’s.” He turned to face her fully, and something in his features pinged off her recognition. Luke offered the smallest encouraging smile, and it struck home — hard — as he finally extended a hand to shake.

Rey looked down, finding he offered the callouses and cracked skin of his left. The reason skirted her, unwilling to strike home, though she fumbled to make the exchange, she couldn’t rightly say why it was odd at first. 

Her voice seemed to float from a distance. “You’re Luke Skywalker.”

Han Solo’s friend. Leia’s brother. Obi-Wan’s confidant.

Rey’s knees felt as if they would give out:

Ben’s uncle. Estranged. Back again for the funeral for his friend.

Luke cleared his throat. “It’s always a challenge, when someone returns to their roots. Sometimes the surprises we find waiting for us aren’t always welcome.”

He glanced at the graves of her parents, knowing.

“I never knew them,” Rey said in a small voice. “My family.”

“Ah,” said Luke, nodding. “Of course.”

“Sorry?”

Wrinkles formed deep around his eyes in forgotten smile lines. He almost, for a moment, looked like the boy from the photograph she’d found in Obi-Wan’s ledger. Rey’s heart kicked like a snare drum, beginning to hammer. She’d yet to let go of his hand.

“In some customs, when a person has decided that there could be no possible recourse, they can declare a death. It’s helpful, sometimes, when someone is mourning the loss of their loved ones so deeply to find closure by, well, ‘burying’ them.”

Luke looked to the graves marked with the names of Rey’s parents — two people she’d never known in her brief life.

“It was a difficult time for your grandfather when he made this decision. He needed his own closure, knowing that they weren’t coming back. He believed the worst, I think — but that was after ten years, at least,” he explained. Luke glanced at Rey. “The graves are empty.”

He waited, some decorum allowing Rey the time to process it.

“Empty?” she repeated, uncertain.

Luke raised shoulder almost apologetically.

“Your grandfather was not a grim man. I believe he would have searched until the ends of the earth to bring them home, if he could have.”

But something stopped him, in the end. Something made him decide that they were gone.

Rey looked to the pair of inscriptions she didn’t recognize, time and distance turning the names of her parents into strangers. She couldn’t even recall their faces.

“Why didn’t he?” Rey hesitated on the question, her pulse hammering her ears with the need to know, but too afraid to ask: why didn’t he come for her? Why had he left her alone out in the Jakku desert, knowing she was out there?

“Look, kid -- it’s not my place to start telling tales in a spot where the neighbours are so quiet that all they can do is listen.“ He frowned. “Came to pay my respects, is all.” And in an undertone, “Didn’t expect anyone else to be out here.”

Luke took a step backward, holding his hands up before him defensively. His right caught the light in a way that held a gummy sort of stiffness as the fabric fell back.

Rey frowned.

And then she understood:

“Han Solo lost his life near Kenobi House,” she said. “You lost your hand.”

The ghost of something true and sordid slipped over Luke’s features, rising to the surface and hovering tremulous and uncertain before it reached his eyes and truly betrayed him. Fear. She saw fear there, and its bitter resolve to forget the past. “Buried,” as he’d said.

“You’ve been investigating --“ he hedged, wary.

“I saw the photos in Detective Dameron’s office in Hanna City,” she shot back. “Because the site of my grandfather’s death is as much a crime scene as the one you left behind when you left Junari Point — what, ten years ago? Fifteen?”

“There’s things you don’t know about that house; the land — you’re better off burning that place to the ground.“

“That won’t stop the killing,” she countered. “Would it?”

He didn’t answer immediately, so she pressed on.

“I know that there’s something in the field. I know there’s voices in the night. Nightmares in places of dreams. I know that people have died in this town because of whatever is in that field. I know that it’s not going to stop.” She pointed in the direction of Sarini Hollow. “I know that your nephew is next — I don’t know what’s planned for him. I don’t know if the townsfolk brainwashed him, I don’t know if he was blackmailed or persuaded or guilted into volunteering, but I have reason to believe that he’s next. Ben Solo does not deserve to die because of your refusal to tell me what Obi-Wan was up to out there.” She gripped his sleeve. “_I_ can help him. It’s not too late.”

Luke stepped closer, and Rey fought the urge to shrink back from his intensity.

“You haven’t seen.”

She pressed her lips together in a grim line.

“No —“ he breathed. “No, you don’t know —”

“There’s no one else,” she countered hotly. “Either no one wants to tell me what he was doing out here for so long, or they’re afraid of who might overhear.”

“The records --“

“Don’t mention _feldgeister_,” she shot, bristling.

To his credit, Luke paled, his eyes widening in surprise.

“So you know, then --“

“I don’t. But clearly you do, so enlighten me. Please. Because no one else will.”

He turned away, his whiskers moving with the tensing of his jaw. Wiping his face, Luke said with the sort of finality that ended conversations, “The Je’daii Order died with Obi-Wan. There’s nothing left to tell — he was devoted to his duties in keeping the field, maintaining the balance, and he gave his life for it. That’s it. That’s all.”

Her breathing hitched. “The Je’daii?”

Experience had hewn his features into something grizzled and worn, but Luke Skywalker bore the sort of strength wrought from suffering like a mantle. Its weight bowed his shoulders, turned him wary, made him hard. The look he fixed her with belonged to a man who’d seen things that might never be unseen.

“There is a darkness in Junari Point, Rey Kenobi — a power so strong and so ancient that your grandfather dedicated his life to keeping watch over it so that it might not spread. Here there can never be a balance. The Je’daii were tasked with maintaining the balance, and when they failed —” He paused. “When _we_ failed —”

Luke looked to the coffin, placing his prosthetic atop the wood in a reverent caress.

Softer, “Obi-Wan kept the darkness at bay. He kept his vigil.”

Rey took a step. “Snoke wanted him gone — he wants the land. Whatever’s in that field behind Kenobi House —“

“Is contained. It’s appeased.”

“It’s interested and I think it’s hungry.”

A depreciating twist of his mouth left her bristling. “You don’t even know what ‘it’ is.”

Her heart hammered her ribcage. “Enlighten me, then.”

“It’s _always_ hungry.”

Rey’s cheeks prickled with heat, though cold spread through her chest. She thought of shadows on the West field. She thought of how the corn stalks bowing under the breeze. Dry soil. Thirsty soil.

“There’s a reason he never contacted you. He wanted to keep you away from all this — the legends, the history of this place.” Luke frowned. “It was his greatest gift.” He knocked on the pine box. “Goodbye, old friend.”

“It took my dog,” she admitted, the words forced through her teeth. “Please. Tell me what it is.”

A long, pained pause as he turned from her. “It is what becomes of us if we fall to the dark,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away.

At some point, Rey had sank to her knees in the semi-gloom of the cemetery. The hushed conference of dry grass and the quiet company leaving her ever the more bereft. 

It occurred to her that Luke had abandoned this life — this Je’daii Order and all they stood for. She didn’t even turn when he backed up down the path.

It wasn’t difficult to cobble together the fragments: the whole bloody town was insane, and Luke had abandoned his friends and family for something perhaps a little less fraught with the madness that had infected everyone in Junari Point. She found she couldn’t quite blame him — given the opportunity, the prospect of razing the whole place didn’t seem like the worst option, save that she couldn’t one certain what would remain after peeling back the crop.

Careful not to touch Obi-Wan’s coffin as she passed, she knelt before the would-be graves of the two people who’d secreted her to the Jakku desert.

“Did you send me away deliberately?” she asked them, knowing they weren’t there to hear her anyway. It didn’t stop her from tracing the unfamiliar words. “Was this all part of a plan that I screwed up somehow by coming back here?”

She laughed without humour. Sniffed. Wiped her face.

Maybe there was some purpose to her return. She swallowed, looking into the wood without really seeing. Maybe that had everything to do with saving Ben Solo from a similar fate that had befallen her grandfather.

It wasn’t too late. Not yet.

Hope flickered in her chest — a spark meant to be kindled against the rising tide of doubt.

Rey wished she’d brought flowers, at least, but something else bloomed in her chest: they could be elsewhere — anywhere but in the ground below her knees.

Rey took her moment, her jeans gradually becoming damp the longer she knelt in the high grass. A breeze carried the scent of burning leaves, roiling through the tall grass of the field, bowing it towards her.

It sounded not unlike a whisper, and, ears prickling, Rey looked up to search the field before her.

Some movement caught her eye in the trees to her left. A glance confirmed that Junari was wearing on her, because the hint of something in the woods that raised the hair on the backs of her arms wasn’t what she’d expected at all. A growl — she thought — a little like a dog’s. Like Chewie’s.

There was nothing in the woods, of course, and the urge to call for him caught against her teeth before the words might become sound.

Where she thought she saw movement was only a swaying branch, pointing ominously downward to a small thicket of ferns and bramble, and a felled tree trunk whose bark had been peeled back.

Carved into the wood was a familiar symbol.

Standing, she found her feet moving of their own accord towards it — intent on confirming what she already knew. She touched the mark with a reverence she did not feel, searching the trees for answers to a question she didn’t yet know beyond the obvious: who’d left it here for her to find? Who knew those patterns and what they meant, and who’d be willing to let her on the secret of what it meant?

She thought she understood, even finding the next on another tree further along the path.

Signposts perhaps. Crude, protective charms. Markings meant to call out the dead for what they were:

Sacrifices, she was certain.

Leaving her grandfather behind, she fell into step, crossing roots and rocks along the narrow path, finding the forest floor felt hollow beneath the soles of her shoes as she found the third and fourth marks, knowing that beneath the dense canopy, she might find further answers.

Something moved between the trees, shadows shifting to accommodate deeper darkness — the sort the raised the hair on the back of her neck. Not unlike Kenobi House, Rey had the distinct sensation that something stared back from the wood.

She waited, watching as if something beneath the ferns and between the roots might reveal itself, a chill settling around her that made her wish for a thicker sweater. And perhaps a machete. A rifle. A baseball bat, as necessary.

“Hello?” she called, her voice warbling on the second syllable. “Who’s out there?”

Darkness shifted amongst the dappled shade, a wind pushing branches towards her as if its course might spin leaves down the path, calling to her with other things than merely sound — as if those shadows whispered clear through into her soul.

She shivered, unwilling to back down.

“Show yourself.” The demand rang clear and sharp amidst the trees, and then —

Laughter.

As crackling and dry as kindling set to burn. Snoke stepped into the clearing, the shades lifting as a new sort of tension took up occupancy where the unknown became apparent: Rey had the errant thought that some monsters were more than simple spectres; some were made of flesh and blood.

Some were only men.

She raised her chin.

Still laughing, he applauded her with languid ease.

“Just taking a stroll.” He held up his hands in deference. Hux and Phasma materialized behind him, flanking him like body guards. “You feel that?” He asked. “That bite in the air? Winter’s coming along. Won’t have too many days like these much longer. It’s almost like you can feel the wheel a’ turning — hear the grind of gears as the seasons change.” He smacked his lips, sketching a facsimile of a smile through his broken teeth.

His minions carried tools — rusty ones by the looks of it.

Closer now, but not close enough to be within striking distance, he looked her over with that cold, calculation of his:

“How’s the house fairing these days, Rey?”

She held her ground, though her stomach twisted at the vaguely lecherous twist to his mouth. He turned his head a little to stare at her with one hollow, blue eye. The thought crossed her mind that he could only see well out of the right; the left had been too badly scarred, or perhaps the cranial damage he’d taken had left him blind.

It didn’t illicit any sympathy for the man.

She wondered how much Snoke knew about what lived in the field. Only Ben had ever tried to warn her away.

“Find your dog?” he pressed, that ever-present, all-too-knowing smirk turning the question comical.

The pair behind him repressed smirks, and exchanged a look that made Rey’s stomach twist in disgust.

She jut her chin. “Getting on. It’s slow progress.” She bared her teeth in the semblance of a smile. “Chewie’ll turn up. He was a mongrel when I found him — spent years scavenging in the desert before he wandered into my life — extremely self-sufficient breed, you know. But I’d hate to cross him when he gets hungry. Just about took off a Detective’s arm when we arrived in Hanna. He’d missed his breakfast.”

The minions stopped laughing at that.

“Obi-Wan left a right mess behind, let me tell you,” he said, his humour dulling to keen interest spiked with disdain. His distaste for her lived in the harness of his eye, and in the worry lines that carved ruts along the downturn of his mouth. “You know it, too.”

She didn’t nod. The statement was loaded, and he was testing her to see what she knew.

Rey stepped forward, shoving her hands into her pockets.

“I’m burying him,” she said simply. “Today.”

Snoke glanced behind him. She saw their shovels.

“We know.”

“We’re helping,” supplied Hux, as if it were a chore. Phasma cut a sharp glance at him, but she was smirking too.

Snoke considered her a moment longer, and taking a hobbled step forward, he reached behind him. For a moment, Rey thought he was going for a gun — the pair of his cronies shifting in unease at his back.

Somehow what he offered her was worse than what she’d imagined:

In his outstretched hand sat a corn dollie — freshly made and still smelling of sweet shucked leaves.

“I meant to have Benjamin give it to you, in honour of our solemnities.”

It had no face.

A low, droning buzz filled her ears, looking at its featureless head. It was exactly like those strapped to the fence running along the road that led to the Hollow.

It occurred to her that those were knew. She’d have seen them the last time she drove past, when she’d ventured into Sarini to find Ben.

Rey didn’t accept the offering.

“A tradition — eons old,” he said without preamble. “We make them during the harvest. Kids like ‘em.” He eyed her, scratching the grey speckling of stubble along his chin. “Cheaper than going to Walmart to buy some plastic thing without any soul.”

Rey repressed a shiver. Did that bundle of leaves have a soul? Did it expect one, once its face was drawn on?

“Is this a peace offering?”

He shrugged, his hand unwavering.

She didn’t want to touch it, but she couldn’t let them see that she was afraid. Not now. Not ever.

Rey reached out with tentative fingers, finding the skirt of the doll dry and crinkling — as fragile as parchment. Snoke pressed it into her palm before she could protest, her fingers tingling as if the damnable thing would explode into flame any moment. When nothing happened, she looked up to find his bland indifference more unsettling than what she’d expected:

Anticipation. Excitement, perhaps.

It was really just a doll.

The sigh she let out was audible.

“It’s just a symbol; we show our gratitude to the land for sustaining us, is all. It’s the last corn doll that means something,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “Keeps the spirit of the yield alive for the next year.”

Something glittered in his one, seeing eye when he looked at her then; made her bite her tongue, as if the sudden pain would prevent her from screaming like she wanted.

The woods hushed around her, magnifying sound while dampening everything else. Even the brush of leaves in quiet conference stilled as if listening.

Snoke’s smile was radiant.

“Besides, don’t all girls like little dolls?”

It crinkled in her fingers as she squeezed it, dropping it to her side.

She wanted to stomp on it; kick it into the dirt and bury it along with everything else this shitty little hellhole of a town had to offer: its secrets, lies, and folklore. Traditions be damned.

Snoke turned to walk away, but he called over his shoulder with a wave, “We didn’t see you at the bonfire. Festival’s coming to a close — one more sunset before the season comes to an end.”

She grit her teeth. “Is that when the bloodletting starts?”

Silence rang heavy. It felt for a moment like time hung suspended: shivering as those unseen things of the forest and field turned to look at her, their expectation muffling the world.

Then Snoke barked a laugh: high and clear. The spell shattered, and Rey found sweat pooling in the small of her back, and on the back of her neck like the touch of a damp hand.

She held her ground, hearing the crunch of leaves behind her.

Rey didn’t turn.

“Gentlemen,” said Luke. “Ma’am,” he said to Phasma.

Hux and Phasma shrank back, but Snoke only gave him a dismissive glance.

“Master Skywalker,” Snoke greeted him. “What a surprise to see you here. Come for observances.”

“To offer my condolences to Ms. Kenobi.”

It might’ve been Rey’s imagination, but a chill had crept into his voice. She glanced at him. He didn’t even acknowledge her.

“Got a sense of humour about this one,” said Snoke, ambling around them with a wave. “Just like her grandpa did.”

She watched them leave, the doll clenched in her fist. Determined to be rid of it as soon as she could, she sucked her lip into her mouth, her jaw aching from keeping her teeth ground together.

Rey cracked her neck, waiting until they’d shrank far enough into the distance that she was sure she and Luke were alone. A glance at the man said enough, but he nodded to Rey anyway.

“You came back,” she said.

His mouth thinned to a flat line, and defeated, he muttered, “Seems like we always do. Come on, kid. It’s hard to tell which disturbances in the Force are what around here, these days — or maybe I just need another coffee.”

Rey looked back to the wood once; at the strange carvings on the trees, and decided that enough was enough:

It was time to accept Snoke’s invitation to the “festival.”

She’d return later, under the cover of darkness.

Bowing her head, she followed Luke back to the path — the silhouettes of the three flaking her grandfather’s coffin with their shovels barely visible through the trees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm seeing TROS on the 19th and I'm a wreck. How are you doing?


	21. Seed

Obscured by the tumbling cloud of dust kicked up by the Westfalia, Rey only saw the red glare of the taillights as Luke pulled their caravan off to the side of the road. A few fields away, the squat ruin of Junari Point awaited them like a set of ribs split open and left to be picked over by carrion.

She rolled to a stop, the cab tilting even with the wheels pointed away from the ditch. She killed the engine and sat with her hands on the wheel a moment, breathing in the very poison that made Junari what it was in the clouds of dust: unsettled earth.

He draped his left hand out the window — gesturing for her to join him. When it became apparent that he had no intention of stepping out to meet her, Rey swallowed her rising disappointment. Unable to pinpoint how she knew he’d drive off as soon as he put her in a place that she couldn’t follow him with ease, she strangled the tension into a knot and swallowed it as best she could.

Something was better than nothing, and Luke clearly knew enough of Obi-Wan’s business to make him dodge town altogether.

The feeling had left her legs entirely by the time she stood at his window, frowning.

“I can’t go into town,” he explained, squinting at her.

“You’re not exactly welcome here either, I take it.”

Frown lines deepened in the leather of his face.

“Which cautionary tale are you after, exactly?”

She stared. Hard.

Luke looked away. “Go on. Ask your questions.”

Her heart pummelled her chest, her blood trilling. _Finally_, Rey thought.

“Don’t look so excited, kid. Your grandfather mentored me — took me in when I had no one else,” he said. “You might find this hard to believe, but there are other things at work: protections in place meant to keep things contained.”

She did her best not to sneer.

“The marks around town?”

He cut a withering look in her direction.

“The marks on Ben’s body,” she tried.

He shook his head, barked a laugh that lacked all humour. “That’s something else. That can’t be fixed.”

“The Je’daii --“

“_Don’t_ say that word around the locals,” he warned. “They’re gone for a reason. Gave my own hand to see that business finished.” He searched her face. A glance in the rearview had him warning in an undertone, “Some oaths are stronger than steel. Stronger than the blood that binds them,” he said. “I couldn’t give you all the answers even if I wanted to.”

“Then what can you give me?” she asked.

“Stay away from Snoke.”

Obviously. Which meant she needed to do exactly the opposite. “Is he dangerous?”

Luke’s eyebrows all but disappeared into the shaggy mane of his hair.

“Listen, kid -- there’s no stopping the machine when it gets moving, and this rock has been rolling downhill for generations. Word of advice — you don’t stop the boulder. You only step out of its way. Wave ‘so-long’ as it passes.“

He wasn’t going to offer her anything, she realized. Hedging her bets, Rey shrugged. “Anyone tangentially connected to Kenobi house seems to either die violently near it, or violently deny any connection. I know you and your sister grew up here. I know you lost more than just your mentor — more than your hand. More than your home.” She drew a breath. “Do you even speak to your sister anymore?”

“Leia can’t help you either, kid.”

“Why?”

He eyed her as if she ought to know by now: “She couldn’t stop her own son from going down the path he chose, not when Ben’s mind was made up.”

Rey pressed her lips together.

“And my grandfather?”

He sniffed. “Never met a better man, more devoted to his cause.”

“‘The cause’ being whatever he’d been guarding.”

He shook his head. “You think there’s some sort of valour in wide-open eyes. You’re wrong about that.”

“What’s the in West Field?”

Luke wouldn’t meet her gaze.

“Better not to see at all, because once you do — you can never _un_see. You can only stop looking.”

Rey placed her hands on the window, waiting.

“Ben is the Oat King this year. Did you know?”

Luke’s knuckles whitened on the wheel.

“You still care about what happens to him. I can _feel_ it. He’s not so far gone —” she said. “I can help him. Before it’s too late. But I need to know what it is that I’m trying to protect him from —”

Luke’s pale eyes regarded the town, staring without seeing it.

“Obi-Wan had quite a library,” Luke said instead. “Liked to keep his secrets in plain-sight, I like to think.”

She bit back a frustrated huff.

He glowered, weighing how much he could tell her, which was apparently a great heap of nothing.

“Had a particular affinity for folklore.” He stared, waiting for her to get it.

Rey shook her head, a tickle of something she should know straying just beyond her reach.

She’d cleaned out his library herself. She’d packed away those books.

Whatever Obi-Wan had been protecting, it was now probably swept into a box someplace in the house.

“I think he had a particular affinity for moonshine,” she shot at him.

A small smile. “That was Han’s. Also a good man. Trouble liked to follow him — used to joke that it was the ‘Solo curse’ that he couldn’t keep himself out of it. Obi-Wan did what he could to help him hide it from my sister.”

He sniffed a laugh.

“When those two got started, boy —”

Something loosened in him, deflating. ”Obi-Wan did what he could for us all without interfering too much. That wasn’t the way.”

“What was?”

“Told you.” He licked his lips, looking off into the fields surround them. “Keep the grain. Tend the field.” He nodded.

“Keep the balance,” she repeated with bland impatience.

“You’re learning.”

“Ben thinks I could use a teacher.”

Luke wrenched around in his seat.

Rey drew back, folding her arms across her chest. That got him, she thought.

He moved so quickly she didn’t have time to register before his hand clamped around her elbow, dragging her forwards into the side of the car. The blade appeared out of nowhere, gleaming and blue-white in the dim, and pointed at her throat. A sabre of some sort — sharp. Deadly.

The Luke Skywalker who looked back at her was not the grizzled despot she’d thought; he’d transformed into something else entirely in a heartbeat. A warrior. A knight who’d lost his way, but not his weapon.

Something unseen thrummed between them, catalyzing her slamming heartbeat into a fuzzy drone in her ears.

“You haven’t promised yourself to the First Order,” he breathed. “But you’d fall to the Dark Side for a pair of pretty brown eyes.”

He shook her back.

Stunned, Rey rubbed at her arm, staggering a pace as the blade disappeared. He jammed the key into the ignition.

“Your nephew —“

“My nephew is as good as gone,” he snapped. “I’ve seen inside his heart, and it was beyond what I ever imagined. He will bring destruction, pain, death, and the end of everything I love because of what he will become —”

“Wait --“ She leapt at the Westfalia, but Luke had changed gears. “It’s not too late —”

But it was, because Luke slammed on the gas. His last words to her as the wheels kicked up dust were: “This is not going to go the way you think.”

—

It wasn’t so much that the Mayor of Hanna City was waiting for her, as it seemed as if Leia was trying to intercept her.

With only one road through town, Rey slowed to a stop — seeing the Bordeaux power suit, the folded arms, and the pinched smile as she squinted at the Falcon, Rey thought as if she saw the older woman falter for just a moment:

She recognized the car.

It gave Rey a grim sort of satisfaction that she instantly felt guilty for, but she pulled the wheel over to tuck into a half-empty spot two car-lengths before the Cantina.

Anger ticked like a car engine, leaving Rey hot and humming, a desperate sort of fury at Luke’s departure leaving her bereft and struggling for some sort of reason for it all:

They’d all abandoned Ben. Leia. Luke. Even Han — whose death must have catalyzed Ben’s relationship with Snoke. An entire family in pieces; broken in a way that left a mess that was impossible to sweep up when it was all said and done.

They stood opposite each other in the street for a moment, tension unspooling as Rey shifted her weight. It might’ve been a stand off had they both been carrying weapons.

“What are you doing here?”

Leia raised her eyebrows, startled, no doubt, by Rey’s tone.

“Was hoping to catch you on your way home.”

“You knew where I was.”

Behind her glasses, Rey couldn’t tell what the older woman was thinking.

“I wanted to give you your space,” she said after a long moment. “I didn’t feel that it would be appropriate to intrude.”

Rey shrugged with a little too much force. “I didn’t know my grandfather. If there were secrets he might’ve kept from me, they’re buried along with him.” She shook her head, squinting down a side street as if looking anyplace but the woman before her would stave off some of the creeping anger she felt welling up at the thought of all the things left unsaid.

She’d give it one last ditch effort. She promised herself as much.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Rey asked.

“About what?”

“About your son?” she shot back. “Your husband? You were friends with him — with Obi-Wan.”

The Mayor fell still. It was a moment before she pulled her sunglasses from her face, and even then the face that stared back at Rey belonged to an old woman; a stranger who’d lost too much.

Rey pulled the photograph from her back pocket of her jeans, holding it out as if as an offering that warranted some sort of explanation.

Leia approached, but didn’t touch the photo; as if whatever Rey had was catching. She figured she must have picked whatever it was up at Kenobi House. A curse, perhaps.

“Where did you find that?” Leia asked, the evenness of her voice betraying her uncertainty through its careful composure.

Rey sniffed. “You couldn’t erase everything. I checked the archives.” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Found it conspicuous that an entire harvest season was missing from the microfiche. Obi-Wan was less careful about who he considered friends, it seems — sentimentality kept this tucked away in a part of the house no one would have searched. The cellar.”

“Rey —”

“I don’t understand why you’d hide these details,” she said.

“I’m not your enemy, Rey.”

“I _do_ understand that there are things you haven’t told me about what’s going on in this town.” She flipped the photo over. Though her hands shook, she showed Leia the word written there. “Oat Queen. 1971.”

Leia’s gaze didn’t waver.

“It’s tradition, isn’t it? It gets passed down from mothers to daughters and fathers to sons — that honour. Except Ben doesn’t have a father from Junari Point, and this town doesn’t take kindly to outsiders. What I don’t understand is what you_ do_ here when it comes time for the shift of power between light and dark.”

“Rey,” she said a little more firmly, reaching for her. Leia’s hands had a strength to them Rey hadn’t realized she possessed.

She hissed, “Just tell me what the marks mean.”

It took a beat, but Leia paled.

Rey pointed to the carving in the lintel over the diner.

“They were on Obi-Wan’s body. On Han Solo’s too.” Her jaw worked. “Ben’s back is carved with them as well. Why. I need you to tell me — why.” Her voice cracked. “I need to know what’s going to happen to him — why you keep your distance —”

“My son,” Leia interrupted, her voice level, “hasn’t spoken to me in almost five years.”

She stepped into Rey’s space. It wasn’t in menace; rather, Rey retreated — the intensity of the woman’s confidence as she clasped Rey’s wrist was overwhelming. Feeling herself shrinking, she knew she’d misplaced her anger just as surely as her words had hurt the Mayor:

Her eyes shone with it, the strength in her fingers as sure as her promise:

“If anything, I only tried to keep him safe.” She searched Rey’s face. “The same way I would try to protect anyone. Even a stranger.”

Leia held her a moment longer, until finally, wearily, age appeared to creep up on her all at once. She deflated, letting Rey go. The space between them cooled as the Mayor stepped away.

“You’re not ready for this,” she said.

Gravity anchored her, but it felt for a moment that she might drift on the breeze that scuttled through Junari Point, ruffling the desiccated corn decorations where unknown townsfolk had set them amidst hay bales and against doorways.

She shook her off. “That’s not for you to decide what I’m ready for; what I can or cannot handle.“

The Mayor’s mouth pinched into a thin line.

“‘Kenobi blood salts the earth,’” she repeated, spitting the words back at the older woman. “If that’s at all true, then whatever this is — there’s more to my inheritance than you’re letting on.”

She thrust the photo at her again, waiting. Expectant.

“My grandfather was guarding something. He treated it like his duty, and it was dangerous enough to try and keep me away from it — dangerous enough that I shouldn’t know my own family because I might be trapped here if I did.”

Leia’s brow furrowed, a small smile withering at the corner of her mouth as if she were impressed by the deduction.

Finally, Rey played her trump card: “I’ve met your brother. I’ve met Luke.”

Something in her expression cleared. “He wouldn’t come through town.”

Rey balked. She knew he wouldn’t?

“My brother takes an oath very seriously,” said Leia.

Rey must have shown her surprise, because Leia softened. She squeezed her upper arm in support, and something in Rey crumpled, her chin wobbling a bit.

“You’ve done your digging.”

Rey nodded.

With a glance over her shoulder at Detective Dameron, watching them from the cruiser, the Mayor steeled her resolve.

“I’m not the impetuous fireball I used to be,” she muttered. “But I remember all that spit and gristle.” She looked Rey over, seeming to find something kindred in her that hadn’t been there before. “I forget sometimes that letting things go is a skill I developed when I was older.” Her shoulders sagged, pressing the photo to Rey’s chest where no one else could see it — were anyone else around but them.

“I grew up in Chandrilla County, but for most of my life, I never knew I had a brother.” She raised her chin, as if she found no shame in it. “Adopted,” she explained. “My father was a skilled politician who I admired greatly. Luke was a farm boy. And Han — Han’s heart was in the right place, but he had a skill for ensuring that the rest of him wasn’t; at least not at the right time.”

Watching for Rey’s reaction, Leia continued as she meandered around her, slipping past the Falcon and onto the sidewalk where it became clear she didn’t want to be overheard by her cohort in the cruiser.

Rey followed, not because she sensed that Leia was trying to escape her, but because her heart skittered at the prospect that she’d been right: Leia had hidden the articles about her husband’s death; her son’s implications.

It had been a good guess, if anything — a gamble that paid off, otherwise.

“When Han came through town, well — it seemed as if for a time that fate had others plans for us in store.”

“Obi-Wan took this picture.”

She eyed her. “We were friends. We were children. Han and Luke and I, until Han and I were something more: then we were family. All of us. Family is important in small towns — legacies handed over generations, along with the stories; customs too. We claim their failures and carry their burdens.”

Rey frowned. “Ritual killings included,” she hazarded.

“Pageantry.” Leia shook her head. “It’s symbolic to be the Queen of the Harvest: but it’s a _play_, Rey, and plays have theatrics.”

“Is the blood fake then? The bodies too?”

She fixed her with a hard look.

“When I met Han, he was hardly better than a drifter and a scoundrel with a number of debts, but we took him in too. He became ours, and we look after our own as best we can, even and especially when they get into trouble.” She stared Rey down. “Han was trouble personified. There were so many people after himthat it was a miracle he lasted so long, even hiding out in a place like Junari Point.”

Ben’s words echoed hollowly: _Nothing ever happens in small towns_.

“He was a _smuggler_,” Leia said, plaintive instead of bitter. Ben had said the same. “And Obi-Wan loved Luke, and Luke loved Han like a brother, so Obi-Wan sheltered Han when he needed it, to his own detriment and the cost of his own life, no doubt.”

“You’re speculating.”

She didn’t really know after all.

“Then why hide the articles at the library?”

Leia frowned. “What articles?”

Oh, thought Rey — oh hell. It hadn’t been Leia after all, she thought.

“But the fields — I heard them in the field at night --“

Leia’s look of sympathy dropped her heart into her stomach. “I hear them too; but I know them for what they are.”

She smelled like coffee and faded, flowery perfume, up close. Denture cream.

“You’ll know them too,” Leia promised. “They’re the voice of your conscience before you recognize your own guilt. This place — this land — there’s nothing magical about it. Nothing haunted.” Her lips shook a little, the longer Rey watched. “It’s your mind playing tricks, Rey. Nothing more. All that nothing does is give you time to think about what you should have done; what was ought a better way to live when there were others counting on you. Those voices? That’s regret. Plain and simple. There’s nothing more that can haunt a person except the things they wish they’d done when they had the chance.”

It seemed as if the Mayor spoke from experience.

“I never knew my husband was running moonshine to the locals out of Obi-Wan’s cellar, nor did I know that a bad batch had made it into circulation, one country over. Killed a teenager out there — a boy who’d grown up in the Hollow but had left Chandrilla to find work. I didn’t know — until it was too late. Han had debts. He had a son who thought he was a _hero_.”

The intensity of her gaze never wavered. The word echoed.

Rey could only imagine what it had done to Ben when he discovered who his father truly was.

“I lost my son when he lost his dad. Ben was an angry young man, always looking for direction; to find some greater purpose for himself. To prove that he was —” Leia faltered — her pain criss-crossing her face in the furrows of her features, pain glaring her eyes — drawing her to some far off place where the memories resurfaced to become clear again. “We all want to believe in something greater than this. Han, Luke, Obi-Wan — their convictions were such that they saw more than just possibilities. They _believed_ in a greater Force than themselves; that might guide them to better destinies — and Ben? Ben wanted to be —“

“Worthy.”

Leia nodded. “Yes. Ben wanted to be worthy of the legend that so many people talk about so often; waxing lyrical about a better time when the harvest was plentiful and the fields were green. Ben wanted a purpose — he wanted to live up to the stories they tell every year. He would be the one that was promised — chosen.“

The title he’d been heaped with; _Hafferkonig_. A prince. A would-be king.

“He needed direction.” Leia’s voice broke.

“And he found it in Snoke,” Rey supplied, her voice faltering.

Leia turned back to her, as if remembering she was standing just beside her. The flat line of her lips quivered, her chin crumpling. She steeled herself.

“Snoke _turned_ him. He manipulated him. He groomed him.”

“Han died,” Rey whispered. “Ben left.”

“Yes,” Leia agreed.

“And Luke —”

“Couldn’t stop him.”

Everyone lost who was lost.

Leia fixed her with a long look, assessing. Something softened in her features, as if she were remembering Rey’s age and how far she’d come to better understand what she’d been denied all this time — but only just.

“I understand how Snoke can make someone uncomfortable,” said Leia. “He’s not the prettiest of men, but I assure you: the scars he wears on his face are nothing like those he hides.”

“Am I supposed to feel sympathetic towards him?”

Leia’s mouth pinched into a thin line.

“This man who’s been terrorizing me?”

“Throwing around hypotheticals is as good as throwing chainsaws in a crowded room and hoping no one gets hurt.”

She scoffed. “You don’t understand —”

“I understand that the stress of the situation might be entirely too much for you. You should consider taking some time away from Kenobi House. It’s a hard place, and it’s tough being isolated out there. The land —” the Mayor shook her head. “It makes people see things, when they’ve spent too much time alone; dwelled too long on the things they couldn’t change. It makes people feel them too; things they’re not used to, out in all that darkness. It can become oppressive.”

“I’m not hallucinating.” She heard the lie in her own voice; in the way it ratcheted up an octave as if she were playing at being defensive.

Leia held up a hand.

“The people around here — they do things a little bit differently. It’s okay to find it strange, Rey. Anybody would. They’re a superstitious lot, and try to tell them to do things differently.”

“You’re right,” she sneered. “Might as well leave instead. Easier, I expect.”

The older woman sighed.

“The world moved on without these people, Rey. People in poverty. People who’ve starved for so many winters. They’re only doing what you or I would do to survive; to maintain their hope.”

Incensed, Rey demanded, “Including murder?”

Leia’s fragile hope broke, then, her smile fading into the hollows of her age.

Rey’s stomach twisted in shame. It crept up her sides like an oil slick, slithering and sticky, clinging to her skin and creeping up into her mouth to sour on her tongue.

She wished she could spit the feeling out, but she wouldn’t be rid of it so easily.

“The autopsy report came back.” Leia said, but not without sympathy: “Your grandfather had a heart attack.”

Cold spread through Rey’s chest.

“That’s impossible. I saw the pictures — I _saw_ the marks on his body —”

The Mayor held her hand in deference; a beatific gesture that requested patience.

“That doesn’t explain what he was doing in the field behind his house,” she continued.

Kindly, she tried, “You’re too involved; making connections where there aren’t any to be had — digging into things from generations ago.” A rueful smile pulled at the wrinkles in the corners of her mouth. “Some things really ought to stay buried, Rey.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I understand that this is difficult to hear, but your grandfather was the town’s recluse — the resident madman,” she said in an even tone that bore no argument.

The protest died in Rey’s throat, withering on her tongue before she could counter it.

“Holed up out there like he was for years, his behaviour whenever he came into town —“ She shook her head as if it pained her. “Sure, the locals knew him. People’ve lived here a long time and seen a great many things: seen enough to know when the things in a man’s head have become too real for him to handle. Spooks. Spirits. Has no one told you what he used to say about the corn?”

Rey could barely shake her head.

She heard the tinkle of a bell behind her, and without turning, she knew they were gathering a crowd: this old woman and the trespasser, the upsetter, the stranger in town.

“Called himself its guardian. Said he ‘Kept the Field’ and all that walked in it.”

A lump formed in her throat, her heart hammering with the certainty of it.

“Kept the town safe by feeding the hungry ground.”

“Thirsty,” Rey croaked.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Leia shrank into herself. Something simmered behind her eyes. “We all heard the stories — hearing voices. It was dementia. It’s a degenerative condition.”

“I know what dementia is.”

Her heart slammed against her ribs, the pieces notching together.

Obi-Wan wasn’t crazy at all. They just hadn’t listened to him when he’d tried to tell them.

“Do you know that I loved him too?” she asked.

That gave her pause — seeing some wistful sliver of a lost history in the Mayor’s eyes, quickly fading. It wasn’t that she was free of sentiment, Rey realized, it was that she had to stop herself. Leia chose to remain pragmatic. It was how she protected herself; how she managed to remain strong.

“Leave it well enough alone, Rey. Go about your business. See to your affairs. Then bury it. Burn it if you have to. Rend the whole place down to ashes if it’ll make you feel better.”

Leia turned.

“Then sell it, and go back to wherever you come from. Forget all about this place.”

Hunched as she was, Leia looked all the more her age in that moment: a weathered woman, her losses stark in the lines around her eyes and everything she’d seen.

“Then what about your son?” she said after her.

Leia, almost at the cruiser, set her glasses back into place on the bridge of her nose.

“What about the marks on Ben’s body — so similar to the ones on Obi-Wan and Han Solo?” she pressed, pulling herself from her slump against the car. “How far will these people go to preserve their ‘hope’? Because it looks to me that Snoke intends to sacrifice your son, just like they did his father, and my grandfather, and I don’t know why you’re protecting them.”

The weight of the Mayor’s consideration sat like a stone.

“I couldn’t stop you from trying to save him, even if I wanted to. I wouldn’t, in fact.”

She swallowed, showing a trace of some raw emotion for only the briefest moments.

Rey’s heart hammered, her doubts about Junari Point and its secrets dissipating as if on the wind — blown into the fields where they could seed and grow into something far more frightening, knowing she’d been right all along.

“In fact, I hope that you do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, way back in the day when I was old enough to put away my Christopher Pike and RL Stein, and I started reading adult horror titles, I came upon an anthology of short horror stories bearing a forward by John Mason Skipp. In it, he talked about playing in this really cool band and the self-denial of seeing and believing, and rejecting any empirical truths gained there to preserve one's sanity. He references the the story of Eve eating the fruit of knowledge from the Garden of Eden. The particular quote, which has stuck with me since reading that book when I was twelve, is referenced here with love: "Once you bite the apple -- or the apple bites you -- you can never unsee, you can only stop looking."


	22. Bird Bones

She took the corner off Main at a speed that kicked gravel into the air in an arc that peppered the sides of the nearest buildings, and rained like hail across the stubby lawns. Bits of torn cloth dangled from a few posts, a scattering of corn dollies pointed their blank faces out to the field. She ignored them, though she cast a final surreptitious look at the wheat throne in her rearview as she left town. Gunning it, the Falcon purring under her hands, the fields whipped by in a fury that matched the bubbling anger she felt clear through to her bones.

And Snoke was behind it all.

Hadn’t he said they looked after their own in Sarini Hollow?

It made so much sense now: a bad batch of moonshine was traced back to Ben’s father, and he’d paid the price. But Obi-Wan —

Did he die because he and Han had been friends?

Or was there something more to his hallucinations? His ramblings.

He’d heard the voices, then. He’d raved about them — and he knew, like she did, that something was out there.

She shivered though she wasn’t cold, and thought:

Maybe it was in her blood.

She licked her lips, taking the turnoff to Kenobi house. She tasted the grit of the soil on her tongue.

The answer must have been here the whole time: nestled between the mouldering books of Obi-Wan’s humble collection. She might’ve even handled it — flipped through it while distracted by Ben’s presence on that first day when Snoke had sent him to tear the place down.

Rey laughed at herself, the sound lacking any humour.

They’d even exchanged anecdotes about the books they liked.

She frowned, changing gears as the ruts in the road bounced her in her seat.

Had he known, then, that the answers she’d been looking for were right in front of her?

It occurred to her, surrounded by the tall corn at the foot of the drive, the world hushing to silence as she turned onto the lane towards the house, that it felt a little like she was out of place, coming here:

That everything in the world quieted, allowing her to hear the whisper on the wind as it wove through the stalks. She stopped the car. Pulled the key from the engine, not halfway up the drive, and when listening through the window didn’t convince her, Rey stepped out of the car.

An eerie sensation of detachment rooted her. The corn swayed, but there was no breeze.

_The wind was dead._

Rey looked up to implacable skies, and found that orange cast to the clouds as if it might storm. It wouldn’t, though. She was certain of that. It never rained over Kenobi House.

And the ground was thirsty.

Something remained amiss, and she intended to find out what was left unsaid before something worse would befall Ben Solo.

A dark patch moved in the field to her left — shifting between the furrows and vanishing. She took a step, trying to follow, and lost it. Sweat bloomed over her forehead, a chill settling into her limbs that lifted the goosebumps on her arms. The air died in her throat.

It wasn’t even sunset. It wasn’t even close.

“Rey?” Ben called.

The air rushed from her lungs as the shadow resolved into the shape of a man.

“Yeah,” she croaked, but the word faltered.

She took a step, lingering on the periphery of the field but unwilling all of a sudden to cross over into it. Something held her back; a sense of foreboding, perhaps, that knowing temptation could be strong enough for her to stumble forward without thinking.

The hair lifted on the back of her neck. It felt as if the world held its breath, waiting to see what she might do at a moment’s notice.

It occurred to her that she couldn’t see his face. A dark swath between the furrows. Not a whisper, but calling her name just the same.

She swallowed the lump in her throat, her heart chugging into a protesting, halting cadence. “Come closer.”

The figure stilled. It appeared as if it cocked its head to the side, listening with that vaguely predatory stillness that slowed time but sped the heart.

A wind lifted then, sending the corn rolling in a wave that sent the dried husks chittering. Rey waited, half-expecting something to see something else staring back at her as the corn bowed before that swath of darkness: something other.

Ben stood amidst the grain, a strange look on his face: his features twisted, almost, in an expression that she couldn’t quite read.

Heart slamming against her ribs, the brief relief she felt when she realized it was him and not some monster was short-lived for the look he wore: a distant contemplation turned his attention to an older, deeper fathom:

Something enshadowed.

Something low, and dark, and deep.

In her ears, she heard the whispering again: familiar voices in broken tongues that ceased in an abrupt hush as he turned his eyes up to hers for just a moment before the wind died, and the corn swallowed him once more. A shotgun sat propped against his shoulder — the first weapon she’d seen him carry, she realized, not including those she’d dreamed.

The crop swallowed him, leaving nothing but the memory of the shadow creature that stood in his place a moment before. She lingered, staring desperately into the field, waiting as if expecting it to reveal itself to her once more.

Shivering, Rey tucked her hands into her sweater, wrapping herself with her arms.

“Ben?” she croaked.

“Stay there,” he called back. She heard the crunch and slap of the crop against his large body as he thrashed through it towards her.

After a moment, the corn yielded — revealing a scowl deep enough to cut furrows into his skin. He didn’t look up to meet her eyes, his attention low on the ground as if his feet had more interest as he rolled words around in his head.

Something was wrong.

She felt it as surely as she felt the dissonance rolling from him in waves.

“I was looking for Chewie,” he said when he next came into view. He looked as if he’d been searching for something else altogether.

“Do you usually bring a shotgun on a search and rescue mission?” she asked.

Absent the levity in her voice, they stared at one another bereft the warmth of the sheets they’d left behind in the early hours. She wasn’t sure how it’d happened, only that in the hours between then and now, something had changed and she wasn’t certain what.

“I thought you might benefit from a kindness — and the peace of mind if I could find him for you.”

He lingered a moment, and as if testing the sudden gulf between them, approached her at a step. She held her ground, the divide between them as obvious as the perimeter boundary that marked the corn from the scattered gravel drive.

He lifted his hand from the gun, and cupped her cheek with a tenderness that warmed her through the chest and to her face. Rey caught herself before pressing her cheek into his touch, hesitating just a second before losing herself to the scent of his skin: earth and rough patches, all — and beneath that, there he was: Ben. Just Ben.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He dropped his arm, and cold meandered in with a breeze that tasted like November: chill and laden with smoke. She shivered, wrapped her arms into her sweater, and regarded the low threshings of the path he’d made. She looked back to the gun, and then his face. The sky warmed to a dull yellow beyond him, as if the sun struggled to cut through the clouds.

“I ran into Snoke,” she said, forcing the words out. “He seems to think I have a place in all this.”

Ben’s expression didn’t change, but she felt the tension pool between them at the mention of his name.

“I found him on the path with his flunkies, waiting out there as I buried Obi-Wan.”

She held her chin high, waiting to see how he’d react as she made her confessions. “There are marks on the trees in the wood near the cemetery,” she added. “The same sort of marks that’ve been recorded on the autopsy report.” Not that she’d seen it, but she knew the photos’ gristly detail. She’d seen enough in Detective Dameron’s office.

“I figured they had something to do with the harvest festival; town traditions and the like. Would you tell me about them?” she asked him, as if the question offered her heart along with it. Drawing a step towards him, she saw his jaw twitch as he struggled to hold her gaze, the shadows in his eyes turning as mercurial as his expression.

Touching her fingers to his side, she left their warmth in a spot where she knew that he too had been branded by this town: the marks left on his body deeper than the skin — as if they pierced his very soul.

“Please,” she said, her voice tremulous.

She wanted him to reach for her, then: desperately in a way that understood his soul entwined with hers, their bodies swirled together, meant that they were stronger somehow than they were apart. She wanted him to, because some part of her understood that if he could, then they could escape this place together; they could hold each other up when it was time to tear this place down. Destroy it. But not each other.

Rey had never wanted anything more in her life.

“It’s clear Snoke has a hold on you that you don’t like, and you don’t owe him anything.” She searched his features, trying to find a weakness in his armour — trying to better understand what had happened in the span of a few hours. “You get away from all this.”

Something shifted in his expression — a crack in the facade of his control.

“I’ll help you,” she promised, as if the offer might be enough for him. A quiet part of her crumpled a little the longer he remained silent, but she saw the conflict in him: saw the turmoil in his eyes.

The sound broke when he spoke; leaving a crack in the facade of his calm exterior. He blinked too rapidly. “I can’t.”

The roar in her ears was deafening; the hopelessness in those two words an impossible flood that wanted to leave her submerged.

“My place is here.”

It stung. Lungs constricting in pain, she gasped a small breath before she pulled away from him. She saw his drifting fingers, following as if he’d meant to touch her — offer her the reassurance she craved: that he was still in possession of himself, and that Snoke hadn’t turned him so totally into the creature he wanted the boy to be.

“My people are here,” he tried again.

Rey shook her head, swallowing back the hurt. It stung like rejection: his people. Not her.

“And what about your destiny?” she asked him. “What about me?”

His jaw worked. “Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I was wrong,” he said.

In the distance, thunder rumbled. His expression shuttered, turning stormy. Angry and apologetic, his boots hit the gravel. Rey took another step backward, away from him: the shadow in the field.

“Maybe I’m no better than this. This is where I was born, and this is what I am beholden to, and this is where I’ll die.”

“You’re not from here.”

“I am,” he said, louder. “I grew from this soil, and to it, I’ll return when I die. Junari Point is my mother’s land. My home. And I am beholden to it.”

“But it’s not your father’s,” she whispered. The effect was like a slap. “Those are Snoke’s words; and Snoke’s brand on your skin. You don’t see it, but I do: There’s another way, Ben,” she told him. “There’s always another path. Don’t go this way.”

He reared back, anger bubbling to a low simmer just beneath the skin. He’d contained his rage, but she felt it in him, now: anger had carved him into the man he’d become, and Snoke had helped.

“You don’t know anything about Han Solo.”

It struck her then that there was a world in Benjamin Solo that she didn’t know: an entire microcosm of his history that he kept tightly coiled in his fists. He hadn’t shared much: only the bare essentials, she realized, and those things were scarce offerings. Distracted by him, he’d kept the important parts secret long enough to let her idle in drowsy daydreams. She’d forgotten the nightmare-truth of it:

She’d forgotten to hold him suspect in her heart.

“Did you kill him?” she asked, the words hollow but earnest in her sudden doubt. She felt the pieces that held this reality together fray a little at the prospect as his silence grew long; as creeping and certain as a shadow that only wanted to swallow the light. She inched backward, heels doing the work for her body though she couldn’t rightly say why it felt as if the darkness stretched from him.

His jaw worked. Something shifted in his gaze, leaving her disarmed. More broken than she’d began. It slipped between her ribs with the subtlety of a blade, and did the work of it too. She drew a ragged breath, but held her ground.

There was good in him. She had to believe it.

“Would you leave if I told you that I did?”

She opened her mouth to reply, but found she couldn’t protest quickly enough.

His gaze shuttered as if he’d decided she’d failed him. Drawing back, he raised himself to full height: no longer the dejected, weak little boy, but a man who was barely holding himself together in the face of his diminishing affections.

“I don’t understand —” she started.

A small, cruel smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.

“You met with my uncle, Luke.”

“It wasn’t planned,” she said in her defense. “He was paying his respects graveside. He --“ She shook her head, baffled, and then it occurred to her. “Snoke was spying on me.”

“I hope my uncle gave you the answers you were looking for.”

“Not by half,” she returned. “He said my grandfather was a member of an order tasked with keeping the balance in Junari Point. He said he gave his life to protect the town from whatever is out here — Luke said he gave his _hand_. I _saw_ the prosthetic, Ben. He wasn’t lying.”

A twist of Ben’s mouth.

“He said I hadn’t promised myself to —“ She shook her head. “The First Order? What is that? A cult? A warring faction that stood against the Je’daii?” She stepped closer. “Luke said I’d give myself to the Dark Side if it meant saving you from whatever it is that you think you need to do to fulfill Snoke’s —” She gestured — a fruitless, frustrated shake of her hands. “Snoke’s grand plan,” she spat. Stars, it sounded absurd. “Snoke’s — I don’t know what. His dark designs. His machinations. His puppeteering, because Luke’s convinced that there’s no saving you from whatever you’ve set out to do, and your mother —”

“Stop.” He said it so quietly it was barely a brush of air against her ear. A warning. It raised the hair on the back of her neck — the command so strange and powerful she actually paused, her heartbeat kicking like a snare as he turned those dark eyes onto hers.

Rey swallowed the curl of fear that rose in her throat. Pressed on, “Your mother does not share that opinion. And neither do I.”

In his silence, a gathering storm: the tumult of emotion that sped across his face settled at once — reigned in with a ferocity that smoothed his features but lit his eyes with some new struggle that she couldn’t guess at. Pain, there. His hands were fists at his sides; a visible measure of his restraint.

Rey couldn’t explain how she knew it, but their standstill locked them into a battle of wills: his denial, and her earnestness.

“Snoke gave you something,” he said at last. “Where is it?”

Her pulse began ticking in her temple, confusion quick and disorienting. “What?”

Glowering a moment further, he stalked past her to the truck, finding the offending item in the front seat.

“You accepted the doll from him.” It sounded hollow. He turned. “Didn’t you?”

“What difference does it make —” The protest died on her tongue as he reached into the cab, retrieving the forgotten corn husk doll with fingers too delicate. Splotchy red patches appeared on his neck, the corded muscles promising violence.

Ben shook his head, once. His fingers shook with it. Coming to some silent conclusion, he grazed his thumbs down the fragile dress, his hands shaking.

Again, quieter, “You took it from him when he gave this to you.”

Fear prickled in her throat, clawing its way up from her belly and spreading cold, then hot through her chest. That she’d made a grievous misstep in accepting the Dollie was obvious, but she doubted he’d tell her what even if she asked.

Like everything else in this place: Junari Point secreted its stupid superstitions into everything, poisoning even the smallest inklings of hope she’d managed to find.

Only Ben’s fear illuminated the fact that whatever it was, he believed it so thoroughly that she wouldn’t have been able to persuade him otherwise.

“Ben, I —” she began, but the words failed her.

He looked up, staring with red-rimmed eyes, a hopeless weight snuffing out the flare of anger.

Staring at her the way he was, it appeared as if he were memorizing every curve of her face — every nuance, the doll folding in his large fist, the papery snapping sounds it made as it crackled like bird bones.

Her eyes burned, the feeling that this was goodbye sudden and strange and surreal.

The rev of an old engine cut the quiet, crashing through the wall of corn as if the impenetrable silence had served only to keep them isolated for moments. It didn’t last. She didn’t know why she thought it might’ve.

The truck was familiar to her as the man behind the wheel. When Phasma slid from the back seat, the engine still rumbling, Ben held up a hand as if asking her to stand down as he regarded Rey.

Some old ritual between them, she guessed: it twisted the knot in her gut into a fist that began hammering away at her heart. She felt like it might be crushed against her ribs at any moment.

“Please,” she tried again, turning to him with the full intensity of everything she wanted to say but couldn’t: every plea, every hope, and every misery at their denial. He would go to Snoke, though she’d been so convinced that he’d go with her if she only asked him. That was the hubris of it: she believed he would… for _her_.

“There’s more than this.”

He shook his head. Under the failing light, she saw something dark and shifting behind him — a summons to the night that unfurled and grew hulking. It was a moment further before she understood that it was only his shadow.

Snoke didn’t need to call from the truck. Rey already knew that Ben would go to him.

Rey already knew that Ben might already be lost.

She just didn’t want to believe it.

“You should leave,” he said, his jaw stiffening with resolve. “Right now. Tonight.”

His throat worked, but he turned from her anyway.

Rooted, she watched him go. Watched him hesitate as he placed the shotgun against the rear wheel of the Falcon.

“That’s not how this works,” she called after him, her voice strong and ringing over the field. A challenge. Stay, she begged him silently. Stay with me.

He climbed into the truck bed, watching her as Snoke backed up in a perfect u. Hux smirked from the shadows of the front seat.

Head down, his elbow on the side, he turned his profile to her briefly.

“Forget the house, Rey.” His voice carried over the engine, not an ounce of warmth in it. “There’s nothing there for you, you said so yourself.”

“But what about you?” she cried, furious all of a sudden that he’d dare tread so lightly around the worst of it.

Snoke’s truck idled, its brake lights painting the field as red as the sky. Something in Ben’s eyes stopped her from chasing him down — from throwing herself after him into that truck bed and dragging him back to the ground.

His eyes were chipped obsidian.

“There’s nothing here for you either,” he said.

It hit her low and heavy: leaving her winded and unwilling to struggle for breath. He didn’t mean it, she reasoned, searching his features for some sign of grace: that he’d falter or hesitate, or show her some sign that she misunderstood: he didn’t want her.

He only wanted her gone.

Ben made no further offerings to her: no dismissals, and no appeals.

Rey pulled a breath between her teeth though it burned her throat. Forced it into her lungs. Forced herself to remain standing and strong before him as the car turned and Ben’s figure became a brooding contemplation marred by the glass.

To Snoke’s credit, he didn’t peel off.

Rather, he left her with a parting jab:

“You’re in over your head, girl,” he said. “Maybe it’s about time you consider selling the old place to someone who’d be better at handling it. And all its problems.”

It didn’t have any problems, she was about to argue — then clicked her jaw shut.

Something occurred to her, then: why not confront him? Why not tell Snoke she knew what he was up to — that he’d spent all this time trying to scare her off with his small town nonsense?

She stopped herself.

“Too much stress for a soul — look what it did to old Obi-Wan, after all.”

It clicked into place, then — the message becoming clear:

If she wouldn’t join them, they’d destroy her to get to her land.

She offered him nothing further than a blunt, hard, “You’re trespassing,” with the jut of her chin.

Chuckling in that wheezing, welted way of his, he waved — gravel spitting as the truck turned to give her a last, parting glance at Ben in the trucked. He wouldn’t look at her, though Rey swore she saw a glimmer at the corner of his eye.

She remained, watching the fading headlights long after they’d dimmed down the road. Beneath the bruising sky, she listened to the rustle of the corn and its secrets, telling herself that some things sat heavier than fear of the darkness and the silence that waited for her to drop her guard:

She didn’t worry for herself, though the wind grew colder as it slaked the crop, pushing those dry, heavy heads to the ground around her. It revealed nothing more than what she already knew: she remained alone in a desolate landscape.

The corn Dollie lay facedown in the road, dust settling to bury it.

Though she couldn’t rightly say why it felt such a portent, she knelt, scooping it up in a fist.

A moment passed as the weight of his departure curdled, catalyzing into a nervous sort of energy stoked by his rejection, kindling something else — the knowledge that such stoic disregard for whatever had passed between them remained, and it burned in her with a ferocity she’d not otherwise known in her brief life.

_Leave_, he’d said.

Rey had other ideas: they pushed her feet into motion as she stalked across the desiccated lawn, westward towards the sagging hulk of the building that crouched there: witness to the gradual ruin of generations set on declining with Kenobi House. She shoved open the front door and found herself dragging the cobwebbed canisters free from the ruts they’d hewn into the floor with the accumulated dirt and debris that mired them in — as if no one had thought to unsettle them since Han Solo had placed them there to be forgotten.

Rey remembered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After a little plot tinkering, I've compiled a few revision notes and it looks like I'll be writing the next couple of chapters on the fly. Bear with me because this might take a little longer than the usual "edit what already exists and post it" like I've been doing with the rest of the story. (I wrote 90% of the draft during NaNoWriMo 2018. The 10% that I wasn't happy with were the chapters earmarked from this point on. I knew actual rewrites were coming, but now they're actually here and I'm going to negotiate them as best I can. I have good notes and a solid beat sheet so it's just a matter of carving out the words to fit the picture in my head.) 
> 
> See you in two shakes of a lamb's tail.
> 
> \- october


	23. German Folklore and Traditions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this finds you happy, and healthy, and well. Sorry for the wait.

She washed her hands in the kitchen sink, smearing the too-slick chemical feeling clinging to her skin onto the nearest towel when the gritty, mud-streaked bar of soap failed her. The shotgun she’d set over the kitchen table with a heavy thunk, her purpose narrowing to a tunnel that kept her gaze trained on the scullery door as she wiped her hands down her jeans.

The occasional creaking complaint of the house as it shifted and settled bothered her less than the nervous hum that prickled along her spine with the sort of understanding that she was about to discover something she wasn’t going to like.

The closet door complained at being disturbed, and she clicked on the bare bulb once more without ceremony. Everything that she’d found in Obi-Wan’s modest library sat in a box at her feet, as-yet unloaded into the trash bin outside.

Rey knelt, frowning, and flipped the sagging lid, her hands dangling between her knees.

Funny, she thought, that she’d taken a comic book to read and not something that should have struck her for its creeping familiarity.

The cover sloughed off the book, the last threads that bound it giving up the ghost as soon as she picked it up. Folding its remains over in her hands, she shouldn’t have been surprised: it was the only title in her grandfather’s collection bearing the sort of wear that suggested he’d been through it more times than the binding could handle.

This time, when she considered the cover, it was with the understanding that Obi-Wan’s collection might’ve had some other dimension of purpose — perhaps the mountains of expired food and garbage and unclean clothing were the symptoms of his duty to his task; his devotion to that so-called, recently disbanded Je’daii Order.

She’d wiped it all away; sanitized the evidence of a life unconcerned with such trivial things.

Rey rose, taking the book with her to the table. Through the back windows of the house, the field sat as if in expectation. Nothing moved.

Taking a breath, she tried to reason with herself that anything could be true if enough people believed in it.

She placed Obi-Wan’s copy of _German Folklore and Traditions_ on the table before her, staring and chewing her lip.

That she hadn’t made the connection immediately, well — she was to blame there. If Kenobi House was haunted, his ghost might’ve gone one step further and flung the book off the shelf to truly get her to pay attention.

“Poltergeist,” she muttered, correcting herself. Ghosts couldn’t move things around. Poltergeists, though — Poltergeists could shuffle around the furniture and knock things around. Rap on walls and make nuisances of themselves, if the movies were to be believed —

Polter_geist_. Feld_geister_.

For someone who didn’t speak native German, it wasn’t terribly difficult to make the connection once she caught the thread.

One ghost was noisy, while the other —

“Feld —” she murmured.

Outside, the grain whispered.

“I’d like to buy a vowel,” she breathed, huffing a laugh that lacked amusement. Some faint, rational part of her mind protested at how bloody insane it was that she’d even consider any of it to be true.

She flipped to the table of contents as she sank into a chair. Ran her finger down the items and their page numbers. An entire section was dedicated to the so-named “feldgeister”:

_Ährenkind, Bilwis, Bockelmann, Erbsenbär, Erntebock, Gerstenmann, Getreidemann, Getreidewolf, Haferbock, Haferkönig, Haferkönigin_ —

She paused, skipping through the list of field spirits. She trailed to “_Roggenmutter_” and then “_Weizenbraut_” and doubled back to see find the translations.

“Roggenmutter” translated to “Rye Mother,” and the woodcut that accompanied the summary for the creature had her scrubbing the prickling feeling across the back of her neck.

“Okay,” she said to the house on a breath.

She flipped to “Wind’s Bride”, took note of the customary means of slaughter which involved throwing a knife into a cyclone, and slapped the book to the table top.

Palms sweating, Rey wrenched her gaze to the corn.

Impossible.

Her hands left fading, humid imprints on the pitted wood surface.

Cracking the spine open offered less satisfaction than she’d hoped for. She pressed the remains of the book flat, flipping through to the chapters that she wanted to avoid:

Corn demon who steals children.

Demon rooster that waits in the field to peck out people’s eyes.

The Buck Man/Buck Guy/Buck demon human-goat hybrid.

She giggled, smothering the sound with her fist.

This was a joke, right?

Each appeared worse than the previous entry — a compartmentalized, haphazard array of illustrations to accompany stories of wayward children and adults losing their way after dusk, and the penalties incurred for lingering too long in the fields once the shadows escaped under the boots of trespassers. So much worse for her curiosity was the burning certainty that she’d not know what she was looking for amidst the motley collection of cautionary tales, but somehow certain that such things had no need to seek her out:

She’d already broken into its demesne and trampled its territories.

Whatever it was — it had sought to chase her down once before.

And Ben Solo?

“_Haferkönig _and_ Haferkönigin,” _she read, her eyes starting to sting. Her throat closed as her voice fell to a whisper, fingers tracing the subtitle: “The rulers of all field spirits.”

Rey turned the page, dread curdling low and sour in her stomach at a glance of the black and white print. She leapt back from the book, shoving at it so that its fragile pages fluttered and scattered, leaves sliding from the table’s pitted surface as she staggered backward and away from the crude lines that formed their bodies.

She should’ve been glad of the monochrome printing, but even without colour, she understood the pools at the monarchs’ feet weren’t intended to be water:

The staring eyes that made their thrones, the abbreviated grins of jaws snapped clean from bone to build the stacks that raised the pair above the offerings below.

Not grain — not like the throne at the town’s centre.

But a throne, just the same.

He knelt at her side, hands raised in supplication to his Queen, his scythe laid at her feet amidst ruin.

Crops grew from those bones, Rey realized.

Flesh fertilizing soil.

Rey covered her mouth, bile rising hard and fast as she frowned back the urge to throw up. She made it to the hall, her mouth filling with spit.

A deer’s sinuous grace unfurled into staring eyes and a curving ribs at the Queen’s feet as if in offering.

Rey blinked away the image, but the King’s body yielded to hers --

His throat split wide and as smiling as his grin, as enraptured as the bliss and blood that married them.

Retching, Rey struck the wall with her shoulder, heaving breaths to steady herself. To clear the image from her mind.

The book, now splayed on the linoleum, showed its ugly secrets only to the ceiling. A creeping unease left her with rattling breaths, the sound loud in the quiet house — dulled by the roar in her ears and the enduring prickle of numbness in her extremities. She thought she might black out for a moment as spots dotted her vision, the surreal superimposition of what she felt when she touched the page and what she thought she understood, cobbled together into fractals that broke apart the harder she tried to recall them.

Memory intermingled with fantasy; horrors only produced by the imagination.

When she wiped her forehead, her sleeve came away damp.

“Fuck’s sakes,” she managed, and lurched forward, intent on snatching it up and throwing it back in the box —

While there might’ve been worse things than _knowing_, she suspected that the mind filling in the gaps might be incentive enough to get out of dodge.

She snatched at the book, staggering into the table. Her fingers left damp folds on the old paper, but a glance left her cold before she could shut it.

The woodcut remained, but —

“Not the same,” she whispered to no one.

The figures remained: the kneeling King, the Queen on a throne of grain, the deer — full and fleshy. No blood. No bones. No remains — animal or otherwise.

Rey sank, sweating and sagging against the wall. Her knees had taken on the decidedly uncertain qualities of jello pudding and her insides matched, churning in complaint. Body quivering, her sweat turned cold at the placid, untroubled gaze that regarded her from a face whose features couldn’t have resembled hers so much that it might’ve, had someone attempted to cast her likeness from a crude cutting that made the print.

And Ben? There was no mistaking the King’s profile —

That mouth. That jaw. That shock of hair so stylized by a breeze that never quite touched Junari Point.

Overhead, a sound from the second floor fell like a shotgun blast.

Heart jamming her ribcage, Rey dropped to a crouch, searching the cracks in the plaster ceiling as the sound of a knock changed in pressure against the hardwood: harder, and then softening to the brush of fingers against a wall or —

A door.

Someone in the house. Upstairs.

The silence ticked. The book lay in tatters — forgotten at her feet and sloughing pages. They drifted like autumn leaves into the corners and catching against the table legs.

She waited, stock-still and reminded at once of the episode in the cellar, recalling all too easily how she’d watched the shifting patterns of intrusion overhead through the floorboards. That same uncanny sensation of being known to whatever other creature shared the space with her left her cold, her blood hammering — a pulse in her temples that left her tongue dry and prickling, spots dancing behind her eyes from tension.

She didn’t croak a word, and the sound didn’t come again.

Fear bled to embarrassment, which twisted as suddenly as it came into anger:

Anger that her grandfather’s protections had left her woefully unprepared for the things that awaited her at Junari Point. Anger that neither Leia nor Luke could be forthcoming about the town. Anger that the field had taken her dog. Anger that Ben, in his efforts to protect her, had pushed her away but not before they’d partaken of each other with the sort of ravenous hunger that left her sick with betrayal… Not confusion. Not embarrassment. No. _Fury _at his failure to see reason.

Her face felt hot.

Rey rose, her jaw set, her gaze fixed on the ceiling as if daring the sound to come again.

The scrape of the shotgun sliding from the table was loud in the kitchen — a clatter of oiled metal and promised violence. The blasted thing was heavy, and while she suspected it’d do no good against the unseen things the book suggested, she’d just as soon make an attempt of defending herself with it if it came to it.

A creak of wood, and then, higher up — a tentative rapping, as if someone had put their knuckle against a door, muffled and soft.

It carried to her like an invitation she’d been expecting, but arrived altogether too late to be welcome.

Sweat tickled her neck.

She held her breath, but the sound didn’t come again.

On the exhale, to the ceiling, she said, “Fine, then.”

Ascending to the second floor, Rey stood in the hall regarding the plaster and detritus that littered the floor.

The walled room offered no secrets, but she pressed her fingers to the old wood of the door just the same as if she might sense the disturbance from within. Waiting a beat, she felt no signs of life from beyond. No signs of death, either, for that matter.

“What?” she asked the house. “Shy now?”

In the darkened passage, the glint of the swinging attic pull cord from Obi-Wan’s bedroom caught her attention.

Her heart kicked against her ribs, her legs turning leaden.

She waited, breath held, noting the closed window and the absent draft — the still swaying cord that beckoned her to ascend one level further.

Knuckles whitened around the shotgun, Rey stared, expecting something more: moving shadows or a semi-translucent figure or —

She sucked in a breath.

Squeezed her eyes shut.

Her single, shuffling step forwards garnered the sort of complaints from the hardwood that prickled gooseflesh down her arms. Her pulse beat behind her eyes, throwing too-quick glances into the vacant rooms.

“Obi-Wan?” she asked the house, syllables bisected by the hitch in her breathing.

No response.

A glance behind her revealed nothing more than the empty stairwell, the barricaded door’s summons silenced, the directive clear:

Whatever lingered at Kenobi House had drawn her upstairs, and it wanted her to see the attic.

A tingling numbness settled in her chest, prickling in the way that anticipated something worse than the obvious pauses in direction. If she waited long enough, the possibility that some evidence might present itself that she was not, in fact, alone — and if she waited long enough, the possibility that it might drive her mad to know for certain that the finality of death wasn’t so final.

Quieter, she tried, “Mum?”

Nothing.

She blinked away the burning in her eyes.

In Obi-Wan’s bedroom, the cord swayed with drowsy predictability.

“Fuck this,” she breathed, sniffing, and marched forward. She grabbed at the cord, fingers halting its movement, and yanked down the small staircase that rained dust and sediment on top of her head from the ceiling.

She thought of the book; its litany of creatures and demons and spirits, all belonging to the earth. She thought of the man who’d tended the field; who’d cared for whatever walked between the furrows. She thought of Ben unable to hold her gaze but willing to hold her hand — his lips, his teeth, his touch, the dream and the nightmare superimposed into something that twisted in her chest until the beat of her blood roared for him.

_I can save him_, she thought. And there was no doubt in it — only the knowledge that she needed to be brave for his sake.

Rey licked her lips, tasting grit.

While it was possible that whatever haunted Kenobi House had come from the field, she thought perhaps that other convictions made for better-intended ghosts.

At least, that’s what she hoped.

The gun rose before her, guiding the way into the top-most levels of the house as she flinched into the space.

Determination forced her into the miasma of ancient dust and musty wood, the ache of the attic settling heavy and interested as a disturbed tomb. A small window permitted a slat of weak light to bisect the gloom, but all else in Kenobi House’s upper level slumbered. She pulled her legs up after her, sitting over the portal that looked into Obi-Wan’s bedroom, crouched and waiting for something worse than the forgotten furniture or sagging cardboard heaped with dust. A few leaves. Some cobwebs and the bones of old voles.

“Okay,” she said to the house.

The darkness swallowed the sound of her voice, turning it cottony. She swallowed, wiping her upper lip with the back of her hand, and scooting backwards onto boards that complained a little too loudly.

With the shotgun in her grasp, movement restricted to an awkward shuffle. The beams could hold her, but the slats between made no promises. She set the weapon down, deciding an exorcism might prove a better form of self-defence, anyway — and crawled to her knees, testing the old wood.

It appeared an ordinary attic, cluttered with ordinary forgotten things -- perhaps, even, in a state of decay even more elegant than she’d found the house. Here, at least, the mouldering boxes and old artworks sagging off their frames showed that they had been placed with care to be kept out of the way. A few holes in the roof had permitted leaves to enter, and more than a few stains on the ceiling suggested that whatever she found amidst the choked, overly-sweet scent of rot would be pulped by water damage.

Rey covered her mouth with the crook of her elbow, and stood almost to her full height. The top of her head barely grazed the ceiling, and trailing it, she guessed at the placement of rooms below.

Directly to her right was the bedroom she’d claimed as her own, if the welts and fastenings jutting through the beam belonged to the hallway’s ceiling light. That meant behind her and to her left, her destination awaited in its silent impatience.

Toes crunching, she ascended to the nearest beam that held her weight and proceeded forward, heading deeper into the strange twilight that made the dust motes glow like dim stars and purpled like bruises in the corners where the light wouldn’t touch.

No walls. Only support beams for the eaves. Still, Obi-Wan’s history in storage boxes made rooms of the hollows — avenues between old piles of clothing spilling from their trunks and stacks of forgotten Sears catalogues. Rey eased between them, backtracking towards the walled-off bedroom and finding that daylight speared the roof in places — bright enough to illuminate the way, but not bright enough to dispel the shadows.

Nothing moved, and she paused between breaths as if to listen for some indication that she wasn’t alone. It left her lightheaded.

It made her wish that Ben hadn’t left, but recalling that he had left at all made her angry again.

Anger was good.

Anger pushed her around the next corner and had her hopping to the next support beam, only to discover a wall of boxes between her and the spot she thought should be the ceiling to the closed room.

A glint caught her eye, beckoning her forward, trying to chase down a wink of something that remained steadfast against the layer of grime that had settled over everything else. Flattened cardboard boxes spread across a few yards, and at the end of the makeshift floor, a trunk gaped open to the window beyond.

Crouching to better inspect the strangulations grey patterns where the dust had been disturbed, she tilted her head, revealing the shuffled patterns of bootprints.

The prints were fresh. Maybe only a few weeks’ old.

Metal winked again, and this time, her heart lumbered into a low, oppressive chug:

Someone had tried to hide it, but the blade was familiar to her — having had one similar pointed at her throat only yesterday by Luke Skywalker. Its hilt jut gold and gleaming from beneath a stack of moth-eaten blankets, haphazardly tossed over it.

A false step, and the ceiling would give beneath her, she was certain. She eased onto the piled boxes, trying best to tread around the weakest points, but a sound from her right caught her attention.

Jerking on reflex, Rey brought the shotgun up, too late —

She wobbled, her heel sliding off the cardboard pile and cracking onto the wood slat off the riser. She took a step back, trying to right herself, her hip catching a box that slid from its stack, and her after it as she staggered backward trying to regain her footing.

The floor groaned at the disturbance, sodden and bowing with her weight as she reeled at the powdery scent of grain filling the room, the crackling sound of static electric and hot as the lights of an old radio guttered on in the gloom, winking to life like orange eyes in the shadows. The dial spun. The shotgun hit the floor, the butt jamming her fingers.

It didn’t fire, for which she was grateful, but her hip stung and her bones shuddered from the impact as she struck. A cloud of dust lifted into the air around her, disturbed by her fall.

The radio crackled, spitting a jumble of noise and static that became a sports announcer’s voice, and then music, and then only white noise.

The sound sputtered.

Died.

The lights on the radio dimmed but fought against fading entirely.

Breathing hard, her vision clouded, she looked down to see that she’d landed after the stack of splintered boxes, chalked lines in the dust smeared through with the disturbance. She moved her leg with a wince, her muscles protesting, ruining the markings further as she drew back her knee to see what she’d crashed into.

Something whispered under the gush of static.

Heart jackhammering, she strained to hear it, trying to make sense of the those sibilant whispers and hearing only — at a distance — the word,

— _Sweetheart_ —

But not comprehending because the lines circling her formed a pattern that she knew: a collision of interlocking stars set within a circle, characters limning the entirety of the sigil.

The floor groaned beneath her, splintering under her weight as the ceiling gave way, and Rey plummeted through to the room below with the heavy weight of absent grace.


End file.
